On the margins of labor and nation: Cuban and Caribbean domestics in twentieth-century Cuba

Women of African descent dominated the domestic service field in mid-twentieth century Cuba. While most of them were native Cubans, especially in the eastern cities of Camagüey and Santiago de Cuba a significant number were migrants from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. Cuban and foreign sugar plantation owners had welcomed Caribbean migration to the island since Cuban independence in 1902 because cheap foreign labor kept their profits high. In the tiempo muerto (dead time) when there was no work on the plantations, many Caribbean-born men and women found work in private homes. They also formed their own social clubs, churches and mutual aid funds across Cuba. And they attempted to organize themselves as workers, outside of the realm of their Cuban counterparts’ organizing efforts.

            The 1930s and 40s saw unprecedented nativist and anti-foreign sentiment among the Cuban working class, but little of the rhetoric in speeches and newspaper columns discussed Caribbean workers’ entrée into domestic service or how Afro-Cubans felt about the competition in the market.  This paper explores the distinct experiences of Cuban-born and Caribbean-born domestic workers in Cuba, comparing them to understand how their nationality affected their status as workers. Radical Communists began to organize domestic workers in the late 1930s, but these efforts left non-Cubans out of the conversation. This paper thus explores issues of nationality, class, gender and intra-racial distinctions in a marginalized labor field.