| This dissertation seeks to explain the development of British West Indian ethnic communities in Cuba. First, it examines the migration and settlement patterns of Jamaican and Barbadian immigrants to Cuba between 1900 and 1959. Second, it explores the conditions and processes that propelled them to maintain a separate ethnic identity as British West Indians that has endured over four generations. Third, it examines how they used their racial and ethnic identities as a means of negotiating for resources between two of the dominant resource-holders, Cuba and Great Britain.; 130,000 to 170,000 British West Indian immigrants went to Cuba between 1900 and 1929 following Cuba's agro-industrial sugar expansion. While most left before 1940, more than 30,000 remained and formed communities in Havana and the Eastern Provinces.; Using personal interviews with the surviving immigrants and their descendants, archival sources and some secondary sources, this research attempts to understand the immigrants' perspectives, challenges and responses under conditions of significant social inequality. For the black British West Indians, race offered a limited basis for negotiation with both the Cubans and the British. Geopolitical reality was a dominant factor in identity politics. The British, to advance their own self-concepts and power interests continued to strengthen the idea of a British identity for her black subjects in Cuba and their Cuban-born children up to and beyond the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Britain, as Cuba's second largest trading partner, exerted influence in Cuba. After the early 1920s Cuba used this economic relationship in an attempt to gain more independence from U.S. economic dominance. For English-speaking black West Indians, their identity as British subjects became a significant part of their negotiating strategy, both for self-affirming reasons and because that identity held the most salience within the field of power in which they functioned. While this was valuable during the long, difficult years of hardship, this emphasis on their British identity probably also served to slow their assimilation and integration in Cuba. |
