This book, with its five core chapters, is based on research from primary archival sources and oral testimonies. The authors take the view that to understand twentieth-century Cuban history and society one has to have a real understanding of the island's connections to the non-Cuban Caribbean at that time. This conviction has led them to examine the place of Anglophone and Francophone Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the socioeconomic and cultural life of Cuba as the story of sugar, political change, and nationalism unfolded between the 1920s and the Castro-led Revolution of 1959. Against this changing background, and despite the presence of a local black population in Cuba (descendants of slaves), the large European immigrant population, chiefly from Spain, totally dominated the national identity of the Cuban state. Local blacks were ignored, and the Afro-Caribbean workers from Haiti and the British Caribbean who migrated to Cuba in large numbers between 1916 and 1925 were eclipsed. The Afro-Caribbean immigrants came to define the concept of “foreign” and their challenge was to “become Cuban,” legally and culturally, in order to overcome the barrier of race and fit the construction of the emerging Cuban nationalist identity.

In the 1920s, Cuban sugar production expanded rapidly, but this growth largely affected only the eastern provinces. The major effect, discussed in the opening chapter, was that the black immigrant workers related directly to the estates and their owners and agents (mostly North American), not to the Cuban state as a whole. They were essentially outside the sphere of government influence and authority. The immediately following chapters explore the living and working conditions of British Caribbean immigrants in eastern Cuba, and then move on to the economic and political changes that critically affected these immigrants from the 1920s to the 1940s. Attention then turns to the relationship that existed between these communities and the British authorities, to whom the migrants made their hardships known. This reliance on British rather than Cuban authorities shows that migrants believed their rights were based on their legal status as British subjects, not as Cuban workers.

In the economic depression of the 1930s, and particularly during the presidency of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba's eastern provinces and their estates were brought under the effective control of the Cuban government. New labor laws required estates to send foreigners away and employ only Cubans. This policy pitted black immigrants from the Caribbean against white immigrants from Spain, thus heightening racism at a national level and bringing about a crisis of identity for persons of Anglo-Caribbean and Haitian descent. The pragmatic response of the immigrants was to integrate themselves into Cuban culture and society as best they could, through marriage, speaking Spanish, and engaging in Cuban sports and other activities.

Finally, the book discusses what life was like for those British Caribbean immigrants and their descendants who remained in Cuba after the 1930s, and the extent to which they adopted a dual culture and identity in order to negotiate employment as well as official acceptance. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the radical change in Cuban policy and international economic and diplomatic relations meant that contact between people of British Caribbean descent and their countries of origin virtually ceased. The English language itself was perceived to be counterrevolutionary, and thus had to be abandoned or subsumed by those who had inherited British Caribbean language and culture.

The book provides an engaging discussion of the changing fortunes of the Caribbean immigrants and their descendants in Cuba from the early 1920s to 1959, as well as their contradictions of identity in being simultaneously British subjects and Cuban citizens. Immigration, racism, and cultural differentiation were the experience in many other parts of the region. Even the plantation history varied across the region. The late expansion of sugar, the relatively small numbers of slaves imported, and reliance on alternative sources of labor were not solely a Cuban phenomenon. Therefore, questions regarding what makes Cuba exceptional within the Caribbean, and what makes Cuba “Caribbean,” continue to fascinate, even more so as the current changes in US-Cuban relations gather pace. As in many good studies, the questions raised can be as interesting as those that are answered.