Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves

This presentation chronicles Black internationalist activism in a place where we might least expect it—the US-dominated enclaves of northeastern Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s. At the dawn of the twentieth century, powerful US multinational corporations transformed northern Oriente from a region of multi-racial independent cultivators into one of the most concentrated zones of US economic imperialism in the Americas. In an attempt to insulate sugar production from political turbulence and labor instability, sugar companies imported workers from the British West Indies and Haiti, hoping they would be isolated in Cuba. By the late 1910s, the region was seen as quintessential spaces of company dominance, isolation, and labor subjugation.

Yet, it was in northern Oriente that several transnational movements for race and class solidarity proliferated. In the early 1920s, immigrant sugar workers in northern Oriente led the Caribbean arm of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest Black organization in world history. In 1933, Haitian, British West Indian, and Cuban workers collaborated in a strike wave that shook the sugar industry, as strikers ceased production and took over three dozen sugar mills. The communist left heralded this multi-racial, multinational revolutionary strike at the heart of US imperialism, and the insurgency upended prevalent notions about where the hearts of global radicalism were situated. In the late 1930s, Afro-Cubans from the region volunteered to support the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascist insurrection in Spain. In short, northeastern Cuba, a space that epitomizes the potentially totalizing power of imperialist enclaves, emerged as a both a key node in transnational solidarity movements and as a focal point for oppositional visions of resistance in the interwar period.