Exploring the lives of over 100,000 British West Indian workers who travelled to Cuba to work predominately in the sugar cane industry between 1898 and 1948, Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres has written a brilliant study on how these workers’ race, colour, ethnicity and labour influenced Cuban society, economy and culture. He traces how these categories led to a ‘troubled relationship’ between the Black migrant workers and the Cuban government officials as well as the Cuban people. Giovannetti-Torres’ excellent book also examines the relationship that the Black migrant labourers had with their colonial British officials in Cuba and in their home islands. Although the workers viewed themselves as loyal subjects of the empire, their status was engendered not only by the concepts of race, ethnicity and colour, but also by their island's diverse socio-economic realities as well as their insular identities. The combination often strained the relationship as the workers sought the support and protection of British authorities.

The book shows a meticulously researched study based upon archival materials from five countries, ethnographic interviews and personal papers, as well as various newspapers and journals from multiple countries. Giovannetti-Torres employs these sources and a transnational approach to argue that the experiences of Black British migrant workers in Cuba were informed by the concept of ‘Whiteness’ that the political elites of Cuba committed themselves to using while creating an independent republic. This ideology was discussed and developed initially during the African slavery era of the nineteenth century to marginalise and control Black Cubans. When large numbers of Black British workers began to arrive in 1912, the political and commercial classes feared their ‘Blackness’ and transformed the workers into the ‘Other’. They portrayed these migrant workers in stereotypical terms, while blaming them for the country's social, political, economic and cultural ills. Some colonial British officials in Jamaica, Dominica, Saint Vincent, Barbados and other British Caribbean islands, as well as those in Cuba, also held these beliefs. As a result, they tended not to believe the reports written by the workers describing the poor and often violent treatment that they experienced. Giovannetti-Torres follows and reveals these dynamic systems as the Black migrants moved through the Caribbean.

Part 1 of the book surveys the nineteenth-century histories of Cuba, the British Caribbean and Haiti. In addition, it explores how the Cuban Republic was established; how the country's neo-colonial relationship with the United States informed its politics, social culture and economy; its restrictive immigration policies that excluded people of non-European ancestry; and the disturbances that, argued the political elites, showed that Afro-Cubans and later the Black British migrants were threats to the social, political and economic order based on ‘Whiteness’. For example, the members of the Cuban slavocracy were warned how their dependence on the African slavery trade and labour to produce sugar cane could threaten White Cuban/Spanish power and wealth by turning the island Black (pp. 23–5), as slavery had in Saint Domingue during the 1700s. Their racial fears of people of African ancestry or ‘Blackness’ were expressed in the Ten Years War (1868–78); the War of Independence (1895–8); the August Revolution of 1906 led by members of the Liberal party; and finally the emergence of the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Colour) and the rebellion that this Black Cuban political party started in 1912 to fight for racial equality. The Race War of 1912 showed what ‘Blackness’ meant to the Cuban authorities and elites: they would project their fears onto the Black British migrants.

After discussing the patterns and volume of Black British Caribbean migration to Cuba between 1898 and 1948, Giovannetti-Torres focuses on how xenophobia and violence affected the workers during the 1910s. Deemed essential for the sugar industry by Cuban and US companies, many White Cubans believed that foreign Black workers were involved in the Liberal Revolt of 1917. Cuban troops marched into the town of Jababo and killed over a dozen Black migrant workers viewed as supporters of the Liberal Party; numerous individual acts of violence had occurred before the Jababo Massacre.

Part 2 of the book is dedicated to how the workers’ presence influenced the diplomatic relationship between Cuba and British officials of the Windward and Leeward islands and Jamaica between 1917 and 1930. The decline in the price of sugar in 1921 and the subsequent collapse of the economy tested the foreign relations between Cuba and Britain. Discussing ‘the racial politics of migrant labour’, Giovannetti-Torres shows that the only power British officials held to try to protect the Black migrants was to threaten to end all Black immigration. This strategy temporarily improved the treatment of the workers. The depressed economy, however, engendered xenophobia and nationalism. Encouraged to report to the consul general that their abuse continued, many Black workers also took matters into their own hands and joined Marcus Garvey's organisations for support and welfare. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1920s, the colonial British officials of the eastern Caribbean islands made immigration policies to suit their own interests and those of their workers in Cuba. Their decisions highlighted the different experiences that some workers lived compared to those from Jamaica and Haiti. Some restricted immigration to Cuba while others let their workers decide to migrate to Venezuela, or to the Dominican Republic. Giovannetti-Torres reveals the various experiences workers had in the rich and excellent chapters that cover the 1930s and 1940s, and which end the book.

Black British Migrants in Cuba is a comprehensive study of the experiences of Black British Caribbean workers in Cuba. The breadth of this transnational study is impressive as well as its analysis of workers’ agency; their relationship with officials of the British Empire; and how the control and exploitation of Black workers were informed by the categories of race, ethnicity and colour. It is a significant contribution to the histories of Cuba, Black labour in the Caribbean and race relations in the British Empire. Black British Migrants in Cuba will become required reading for scholars and students of the history of the Black diaspora, labour, Cuba and the Caribbean.