Frances Sullivan begins her study with a central contradiction: in the 1920s, the remote, American-owned sugar plantations in eastern Cuba seemed to epitomize the “totalizing power of imperialist enclaves” with their “vast expanses of foreign-owned land, privately held and managed ports and railroads, company-controlled essential facilities, and immigrant labor.” Yet the same freighters that carried away tons of sugar delivered newspapers, letters, pamphlets, foreign workers, and agents of “alien” ideas like Garveyism, Marxism, and anti-fascism. The enclaves “were closed yet open, isolated yet deeply connected to the wider world” (pp. 2, 15).

Sullivan’s excellent study argues that despite fierce and constant repression, sugar workers inhabited not isolated backwaters but a cosmopolitan world, defined as communities with “outward-looking world visions” (p. 11). Both Cuban and immigrant workers had cosmopolitanism forced upon them—the former by foreign influence over their island, the latter by economic hardship that drove them to travel in search of work.

Building on the work of recent scholars, including Hakim Adi, Barry Carr, Aviva Chomsky, Adam Ewing, Gillian McGillivray, Marc Mcleod, Lara Putnam, Oscar Zanetti, Alejandro García, and Louis Pérez, Jr., Sullivan analyzes three transnational movements that “took off” in the sugar zone: “Garveyite pan-Africanism, communism, and transatlantic antifascism.” Cosmopolitanism, she argues, did not mean an abstract solidarity. The “radical solidarity movements” had local roots and promised concrete benefits to both native and immigrant workers (pp. 1, 10).

Writing in lucid, jargon-free prose, Sullivan begins each chapter with the arrival or departure of a significant figure in her story, a clever way to show how constant circulation nurtured “cosmopolitan enclaves.” A background chapter explains that foreign-owned companies moved into the east after 1902 by pushing out subsistence farmers living on communal lands. The imperialism of the subtitle is largely of this economic variety; Washington appears only briefly in the person of Sumner Welles violating the letter and spirit of the Good Neighbor policy during the crisis of 1933.

As monoculture agribusiness invaded eastern Cuba, its key input was labor. Sullivan highlights the role of Antillanos—workers from Haiti and the British West Indies—some 600,000 of whom arrived on the island in the first third of the century. Companies preferred these “third-country workers” because they earned less, lacked robust legal protections, and faced hurdles of language and nationality when seeking common cause with Cuban workers (p. 7).

The fraught relations of Afro-Cubans and Antillanos is a central theme of the study. Afro-Cubans faced discrimination and violence at home—the savage repression of the Partido Independiente de Color in 1912 cast a long shadow. Yet sugar companies counted on racial and national prejudices to keep workers of color apart, and Sullivan pays close attention to moments of both collaboration and conflict.

Immigrant workers in Cuba stayed in touch with events in the region and beyond. After the Great War, Garveyism swept across the sugar zones, offering workers an infectious blend of mutual aid and race pride. Garveyism clearly had native Cuban followers—the movement’s chapter in eastern Cuba survived until 1960, 20 years after Garvey’s death. In the mid-1920s, communist organizers denounced Garveyism as petty bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, but they could not deny its appeal, especially to West Indian workers.

The book’s middle chapters focus on labor struggles in the sugar zone. Activism grew in the mid-1920s after wartime sugar prices cratered. At first, Cuban organizers made inroads with mill and railway workers but ignored field hands. The Cuban Communist Party (PCC), founded in 1925, sent organizers east but similarly overlooked agricultural workers. Activists could not overcome their assumption that foreign workers who cut most of Cuba’s cane were “‘unorganizable’” (p. 130).

On the eve of the vast labor insurgency known as the Revolution of 1933, unions and the communist party finally shed their ideological blinders. The Sindicato Nacional de Obreros de la Industria Azucarera, organized in 1932, led the way, welcoming white and Black, native and foreign, male and female, industrial and agricultural workers. The PCC also broke with past policies to organize cane cutters (p. 111).

The extraordinary events of 1933 made Cuba the focus of global attention. Unified for the first time, sugar workers rose up in a movement that was “completely revolutionary,” not only going on strike but taking over mills and arming their own militias (p. 117). To communists everywhere, the solidarity of “multiethnic, multinational groups of workers” fighting American economic imperialism fulfilled their most fervent dreams. “The Cuban battle was bigger than one island,” proclaimed an international meeting of communists in New York (pp. 139–140).

In these gripping pages, Sullivan’s analysis zooms in and out, explaining debates within the Comintern but also providing close-ups of fascinating figures like Afro-Cuban organizer Roberto Buzón. Inspired by the insurrection of 1933, Buzón joined the Cuban Communist Party at age 24, rose quickly, and later fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Sullivan provides many similarly revealing vignettes.

The heady days of 1933 did not last. Repression was swift and brutal—by early 1934, “endangering the sugar harvest was punishable by death” (p. 139). More shocking still was the betrayal of the immigrant workers whose militancy had fueled the insurrection. “The very cross-national collaboration that made the sugar insurgency a forerunner in the global struggle against imperialism was challenged … by rising nativism” in Cuba (p. 145).

The uprising had ended the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, but the progressive president who followed him, Ramón Grau, demonized foreign sugar workers and pushed through anti-immigrant legislation with broad popular support. Having finally proved their militancy, foreign workers made themselves scapegoats and targets for deportation. The wedge Grau drove between Cuban and Antillano workers was the same one the sugar companies had relied on for decades.

The extraordinary events of 1933 ended with repression, but Sullivan points out that the stage had been set for a return match between imperialism and internationalism. Both Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro hailed from the eastern sugar zone. The young Batista worked for United Fruit and remained pro-American, while Fidel “emerged from a decades-old, popular, anti-imperialist tradition” that had its heyday in 1933, when Castro was eight years old. This excellent volume draws on archival research and recent scholarship to reveal how “the arrival of foreign capital engendered internationalism in eastern Cuba,” pitting “globalization from above” against “globalization from below” (p. 13).