Chinese Indentured Labor and Caribbean Exoticism: Cubans and North Americans Reflect on the “Coolie”

• In Event: Chinese Migration in Latin America

Abstract

This paper analyzes points of intersection and dissent between Cuban intellectuals and North American travel writers proposed as they attempted to understand the consequences of the importation of Chinese indentured servants as a semi-free labor force in anticipation of the end of slavery and national independence. Cuban intellectuals, including José Antonio Saco, viewed Chinese labor immigration as an irreconcilable threat to their ethno-nationalist agenda and lobbied for Chinese exclusion, regardless of its economic costs. North American travel writers who at home were critical of “Coolie” labor, when in Cuba celebrated the presence of Cuban “Coolies” as part of the island’s fabricated exotic landscape. North American writers such as Samuel Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil (1870); and Julia Ward Howe, A Trip to Cuba (1890) praised Cuba’s Chinese coolies’ ability to adapt to a modern market society, in effect a neutral social and racial element. Of particular relevance to my work is a series of colorful lithographs commissioned by a cigar factory, La Honradez, representing Chinese workers conversant with technology and capable of handling complex machinery. These visual images promoted the interests of Cuba’s tobacco industry as it sought to disassociate itself from chattel slavery, and at the same time, confirm what North American travel writers appreciated as a modernizing regional industry within a global capitalist economy that sought the lowest labor costs possible.

Author

• Gema R Guevara, University of Utah