The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Caribbean��

Dr. Anne S. Macpherson, History, SUNY Brockport

amacpher@brockport.edu

Wednesday 9/29/21, 4:30-6:30 pm

The Caribbean is part of North America along with Mexico and Central America�

• archipelago + littoral
• only Spanish Caribbean is part of Latin America
• Caribbean unity:
• plantation societies
• enslavement & abolition
• colonialism & neo- colonialism
• syncretism

�Part A: Early Nationalisms and Nation-States��Today:�Mix of independent nation-states and non-sovereign territories

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUoypQ0ykwI

The Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804

• National identity rooted in Africanness, Blackness, Kreyòl-ness
• 1700s: French St. Domingue, rapid growth
• 1790: 500,000 enslaved people, most born in Africa
• 1791: mass coordinated slave rebellion destroyed plantations and enslavement
• 1794: French parliament formally abolished slavery to keep colony
• ex-slaves defeated British and Spanish invasions
• 1798: Napoleon sent forces to re-enslave
• War of Independence against France
• January 1, 1804: Independence
• 1825-1947: Haiti paid France reparations

The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 1804

• https://haitidoi.com/2013/08/02/english-translation-of-the-haitidoi/
• https://today.duke.edu/showcase/haitideclaration/declarationstext.html

The General in Chief�To the People of Hayti

Citizens

It is not enough to have forced out of your Country the Barbarians who have ensanguined it for the Space of two Centuries. It is not sufficient to have put an End to factions reviving from Phantom of Liberty, which France exposed to our Eyes. It is necessary by the last Act of National Authority, to ensure everlasting Liberty to the Country which gave us Birth. We must convince the inhuman Government which has hitherto kept us in the most humiliating State that all hopes of ever enslaving us are at an End, and we must live Independent or die. Independence, or Death, let these sacred Words rally us, and let them be the Signal of Battle, and of our reunion.

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Dominican Republic

1^st independence:

• 1844, from Haiti, after 22-year occupation

2^nd independence:

• 1865, from Spain, after 1861-65 re-colonization

3^rd independence:

• 1924, after 8-year US Marine occupation

19^th century: little tension between Dominican-ness and Blackness

20^th century:

• Trujillo dictatorship of 1930-61 encouraged white Hispanophilic Catholic national identity
• 1980s on: Taino identity movement
• recently: Afro-Dominican identity movement (In the Heights criticism)

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Cuba’s 30-year �struggle�for independence

• National identity as transcending race: “To be Cuban is more than white, more than black.” (José Martí)
• war 1868-78, 1878-80, 1895-98
• enslavement ended by 1878 in the east; Spanish colonial state ran controlled abolition 1880-86
• 1892: Partido Revolucionario Cubano founded in NYC
• spring 1898: Army of Liberation (40% Afro-Cuban officer corps) poised to take the cities
• US intervened to prevent “another Haiti” not in support of Cuban independence

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Part B: Caribbean Workers in Capitalist Economies

Abolition of Enslavement 1790s-1880s:

• 1794: St. Domingue/Haiti
• 1822: Santo Domingo
• 1834-38: British colonies →
• 1848: Guadeloupe, Martinique
• 1863: Dutch colonies
• 1873: Puerto Rico
• 1886: Cuba

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�← Enslavers compensated for loss of property�

Post-Abolition labor controls: manufacture scarcity of land with military and legal tools

Robert Wedderburn, 1762-1836: born in Jamaica to enslaver father and enslaved mother

• The Horrors of Slavery (1824): “if you once give up the … lands, your oppressors will have power to starve you to death…”

Freedpeople struggled to get title to land.

Post-abolition peasantries strongest in:

• Haiti, Dominican Republic, eastern Cuba
• Jamaica & Windward Islands

Weakest in:

• Barbados & Leeward Islands
• Puerto Rico

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Post-Abolition labor controls: vagrancy laws and debt peonage

������������http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reporting-and-essays/her-middle-passage��

Flood labor market with Asian indentured laborers

• push factors from India, China, Indonesia
• 1838-1917: 400K indentured Indians to British Caribbean, mostly Guyana and Trinidad, most of them Hindu, some Muslim (see image)
• 1840-75: 142K indentured Chinese to Cuba (Cristina García, Monkey Hunting novel)
• 1853-66: 18K indentured Chinese to British colonies

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Working for the Americans: bananas, sugar, Panama Canal

��Worker Responses: �-Migration �-Labor Organization �- Religion�- Revolution�

Fidel Castro, 1953, History Will Absolve Me defense speech

• “Eighty-five per cent of the small farmers in Cuba pay rent and live under constant threat of being evicted from the land they till. More than half of our most productive land is in the hands of foreigners. In Oriente, the largest province, the lands of the United Fruit Company and the West Indian Company link the northern and southern coasts. There are two hundred thousand peasant families who do not have a single acre of land to till to provide food for their starving children…We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows ... Everyone agrees with the urgent need to industrialize the nation …”
• “The little rural schoolhouses are attended by a mere half of the school age children - barefooted, half-naked and undernourished - and frequently the teacher must buy necessary school materials from his own salary. Is this the way to make a nation great?... It is time we stopped paying pittances to these young men and women who are entrusted with the sacred task of teaching our youth. No teacher should earn less than 200 pesos … if they are to devote themselves exclusively to their high calling without suffering want. What is more, all rural teachers should have free use of the various systems of transportation; and, at least once every five years, all teachers should enjoy a sabbatical leave of six months…”
• He invoked Aquinas, Locke, Thomas Paine, the US Declaration of Independence, Rousseau, Cuban patriots like José Martí, but not Marx or Lenin

Part C: U.S. Military Interventions in the Caribbean since the 1850s��Motivations:�- secure U.S. corporate investments�-ensure repayment of debts by Caribbean governments�- secure shipping and trade�- geopolitics

Economic and Military Interventions in 19^th century Nicaragua

• caused by the California gold rush
• Vanderbilt shipping company (NYC/San Francisco) moved 70K west 1848-68, 60K east
• British forced 1850 “no canal/no-colony” treaty
• U.S. mercenaries took over Nicaragua 1855, re-legalized slavery, were recognized by President Pierce
• united Central American army defeated U.S. mercenaries 1856-57

Economic and Military Interventions in 19^th and early 20^th century Panama

• railroad built 1850-55, ran 1855-69, U.S. Marines intervened repeatedly to put down strikes and protests; railroad police chief was American
• canal built 1904-14 after U.S. engineered Panamanian independence

Major U.S. military interventions of early �20^th century

I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it… I helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.

1912-33: Nicaragua

- Sandino resistance

1915-34: Haiti

• Piquets resistance

1916-24: Dominican

Republic

• customs control 1905-40
• Gavilleros resistance

USMC Major General Smedley Butler, “War is a Racket,” 1933 →

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Major U.S. Military Interventions of the Cold War Period

To oust “leftist” leaders:

• 1961 Cuba/Bay of Pigs
• 1965 DR (42K US troops 2K DR deaths) →
• 1983 Grenada
• 1980s Nicaragua
• 1989 Panama

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Part D: Colonialism, Decolonization, and Neo-colonialism since WW2

• political decolonization emphatically ≠ economic decolonization
• Officially 8 colonies still exist in the Americas, 6 of them in the Caribbean
• Officially 3 US colonies still exist (#s 10, 12, 14)
• Add Puerto Rico and the numbers go up by one

Jamaica, August 2, 1962

• exemplary of 13 new Caribbean nations 1960s-80s
• independence via mass pressure, protests, marches, and diplomatic negotiations, not via warfare
• Britain/Holland weakened by WW2 and loss of India/Indonesia
• Britain crushed left-wing nationalists and cultivated moderate pro-capitalist nationalists
• dependence on bauxite/tourism, emigration, IMF loans

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Cuba: an effort to truly decolonize and avoid neo-�colonialism https://www.filmaffinity.com/en/film943102.html

Redemption Song from Uprising (1980)

“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.”

Marcus Garvey, Sydney, Nova Scotia, 1937

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCqquMFQ9IM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoUndHXaTa8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_fvQr1pWQ

1980 context: 800+ Jamaicans killed in violent election campaign, after 8 years of social democratic government (part of the Non-Aligned Movement) sabotaged by the US and International Monetary Fund

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