While the mud and malaria of the Panama Canal dominated the headlines, an equally transformative—and ultimately tragic—migration was unfolding just across the water. Following the Spanish-American War, U.S. capital poured into Cuba's eastern provinces of Oriente and Camagüey, transforming the landscape into an industrial sugar machine.
Driven by a massive spike in global raw sugar prices in 1919–1920 (a period historically known as the "Dance of the Millions"), the demand for physical labor on the centrales (sugar mills) skyrocketed. Between 1900 and 1930, an estimated 100,000 to 140,000 Jamaicans and Haitians made the short voyage to eastern Cuba. The work was brutal, sun-baked, and dangerous, but the wages offered a vital lifeline to families back home.
In the isolated company towns and barracones, Jamaicans did not simply assimilate; they built durable, self-sustaining enclaves. Surrounded by a Spanish-speaking, Catholic majority, they carved out spaces of cultural familiarity. They organized mutual aid societies, held highly formalized cricket matches, and established English-speaking schools.
Most notably, they became a powerhouse of transnational political thought. They established deeply active chapters of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), creating networks of solidarity that stretched across the Caribbean. They turned their physical displacement into networked social power.
The sugar economy, however, was inherently volatile, tethered entirely to the whims of the global market. When the 1929 stock market crashed, the bottom fell out of the Cuban sugar industry. Almost overnight, the massive West Indian population transitioned from essential, sought-after labor to a targeted political scapegoat.
Nationalist fervor and racialized panic culminated in the Cuban government passing the "50% Law" (Nationalization of Labor Law) in 1933. This mandate required that at least half of all estate employees be native-born Cubans. It was swiftly weaponized to justify the forced repatriation and mass deportation of tens of thousands of Afro-Caribbean workers.
Families were fractured, and thousands were herded onto ships back to a Jamaica that was already drowning in the Great Depression. Those who managed to remain were forced to deeply assimilate, though they left a permanent, quiet Anglo-Caribbean imprint on the eastern provinces that endures today.
