Immigration Control as Race-Making and Nation-Building in Occupation and Early Republic Cuba

This paper examines the early structures and epistemologies that governed immigration control in Cuba during the first U.S. occupation beginning in 1898, and in the early years of the Cuban Republic following independence in 1902. It argues that the enforcement of immigration policies, first by the U.S. military and then by the Cuban government, fused nascent notions of Cuban nationhood with placing migrants within a hierarchy of racial preference. Key to this fusion was idea that immigration control represented both a characteristic of national modernity and a way to bring that modernity into effect. Programs intended to facilitate the settlement of desirable Spanish migrants contrasted sharply with restrictions and exclusions placed on Caribbean migrants of color and less numerous migrants from Asia. The merger of race, nation, and migration was particularly evident at the Triscornia immigration station in Havana harbor. Originally an army barracks, the U.S. military transformed the site into Cuba’s most prominent immigration processing and detention facility. American and Cuban ideas about immigrant desirability and national progress overlapped in Triscornia in ways that revealed the importance of immigration control to building a new Cuban nation. This paper draws from several collections, including U.S. Military Government and Bureau of Insular Affairs papers in U.S. National Archives and legal collections and departmental communications found in the Cuban National Archives.