Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves: Imperialism and Internationalism in Eastern Sugar Towns, Frances Peace Sullivan, 2025, University Press of Florida
It is forgivable to despair at the hegemonic grip of imperialism, but history reminds us that it is often where its consequences have been most dire that resistance first coagulates like DNA in the primordial soup.
Cuba understands this truth better than most and has learned over time how the most dangerous weapons in the revolutionary arsenal are neither guns nor bombs—but ideas and solidarity.
And as Frances Peace Sullivan observes, it can be in the most unlikely places that these attitudinal sparks can light the fuse that ultimately leads to explosive transformation.
Her history of Cuba’s eastern region offers dramatic lessons to today’s left that its most powerful tool, internationalism, is often born of local struggles that, in the white heat of capitalism, weld ideas and solidarity into ideological hammers and sickles.
Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves: Imperialism and Internationalism in Eastern Sugar Townstells the story of how a region notorious for the oppression of labour in the 1920s and 30s came to be a critically important centre of radical internationalism.
In this period the northern coast of Cuba’s easternmost province, Oriente, was transformed into a laboratory of US capitalism as mighty agricultural corporations set up shop flooding it with foreign investment in order to process and export sugar.
They included the United Fruit Company, the original “pulpo” of rapacious agro-capitalism in the Americas extending its tentacles across the hemisphere.
US imperialism in this period, economic or otherwise, was on a roll, especially after its forebear Britain emerged tattered and battered from the first world war.
Washington’s military, political, and economic influence was being felt across the hemisphere, US banks and private firms dominated the region’s economy spawning the first multinational corporations, and its armed forces intervened in the Caribbean and Central America 30 times between 1900 and 1933.
Cuba, the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and Central America bore the brunt of its muscular assertions which, in turn, fomented nationalist responses throughout Latin America.
At the heart of this story lies Oriente, where foreign capital was turning life on its head. Within just a decade, it transformed northern Oriente from a region of independent farmers into one of the most concentrated zones of US economic imperialism in the Americas by creating vast agricultural-export enclaves.
Sugar companies displaced the multiracial local peasantry and imported workers from other Caribbean islands, creating company towns that owned everything, exploited their power mercilessly, and controlled every aspect of life.
But as is so often the case, in the process they nurtured something truly unique that holds lessons for the left even today—pioneering transnational movements for race and class solidarity that would have an enduring impact on the left’s development in Cuba and beyond.
Immigrant sugar workers in northern Oriente led the Caribbean arm of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the largest Black organisation in history; by the mid-20s, they were mobilising with organised labour to articulate a wider anti-imperialist struggle; and by the early 1930s communists were organising labour under the red flag.
A new, transnational class consciousness was emerging that stressed interracial, international proletarian unity, and as a result Cuba’s sugar workers would come to figure prominently thereafter in the left’s understanding of the global struggle against imperialism.
This would be put to the test in the 1933 insurgency, when motley groups of workers including Cubans, Spaniards, Haitians and West Indians seized a third of the island’s sugar mills, a struggle that electrified the international leftwing press.
Cuba’s proletariat was heralded as a harbinger of anti-imperialist revolution, and many of those workers and their families would go on to support the besieged Republicans during the Spanish Civil War in the European fight against fascism.
The author writes: “In short, northeastern Cuba, a space that epitomizes the potentially totalizing power of imperialist enclaves, emerged as both a hub of internationalism and as a focal point for oppositional visions of resistance during the interwar period.”
Moreover, Oriente would retain its reputation as a cradle of revolutionary tradition and for its resistance to imperialism with the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
Fidel Castro was born in Birán, Oriente, his revolutionaries landed a yacht near Niquero in 1956 where they launched their guerrilla campaign, and the ensuing war was largely waged in Oriente’s Sierra Maestra.
Castro’s Cuba would become the most important focus of anti-imperial struggle in the Americas, exporting its vision of armed resistance to an avaricious empire through such figures as Che Guevara while building global solidarity through the Tricontinental Conference.
If southern Oriente is the cradle of Cuba’s revolutionary tradition, argues Sullivan, then its northern sugar towns are the cradle of its internationalist tradition, even if this is poorly understood.
The author has compiled a valuable history of Oriente as a local space that considers its inherently transnational connections, a valuable approach which recognises that at times a certain conjuncture of events and ideas can turn what might be considered a backwater into a global frontline.
What made Oriente special was the very nature of the sugar industry itself. As Sullivan writes: “For all their efforts to exert tight control in their dominions and to insulate production from labor instability and political turbulence, sugar companies still relied heavily on constant exchange with the outside world.”
The influx of foreign capital resulted on the one hand in the creation of diverse, cosmopolitan local societies as US economic expansion resulted in the widespread movement of people to emerging sites of empire such as Cuba’s sugar towns.
Labourers, tradespeople, engineers, teachers, nurses, missionaries, merchants, servants and their dependents flocked to towns like Banes where their necessary interactions fostered vibrant communities.
One the other hand, this experimental society was increasingly populated by people in possession of outward-looking visions and international networks, as ships brought in merchant sailors, letters, newspapers, rumours, and political ideas.
In this context—at the very heart of imperial capital—individuals were exposed to the discourses and ideas that enabled them to understand intimately the global systems of capitalism and imperialism that were shaping their lives.
It is a phenomenon that has been repeated time and again—within the British empire, for example, the great ports of Liverpool and Glasgow were the most radical centres of revolutionary internationalism and together sent 750 men to the Spanish Civil War.
The difference with Oriente, however, is obvious, considered in the Global North a peripheral Caribbean region easy to dismiss largely because of the ethnocentrism and imperial prejudice of history itself as it has hitherto been told.
This is something the left must dismantle because as Sullivan points out in this excellent work, the stories unfolding in this corner of the US-Caribbean world have global significance.
She writes: “This book takes a cue from historians and anthropologists who place the Caribbean at the center of world-historical processes and thus shift common perceptions of where the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ are located in global history.”
Moreover, it was Afro-Caribbean workers and not white Europeans who were among the most significant pioneers of international solidarity in this period.
Sullivan writes: “Activists in northern Oriente were acutely aware of how international developments affected their own lives, and they had big-picture ideas of how to tackle structural injustices.
“They joined and built Black-nationalist, communist, antifascist, and related networks that spanned the Caribbean and reached across the western world—all from a small corner of Cuba dominated by powerful agricultural companies.”
Sullivan traces the process by which US sugar companies set up shop in northern Oriente and how they built closed plantation complexes to maintain subjugated work forces.
She shows how British West Indian immigrants and Cubans organised as Black labourers in this belly of US imperialism and how this fed into labour organising and communism in the eastern sugar zone.
She examines how the 1933 sugar insurgency caught the attention of the global left for its revolutionary internationalism, and how this in turn nurtured the Cuban antifascist movement that would support the Spanish Republicans.
Above all, she provides a singularly important lesson for today’s introspective, confused and isolated leftwing movements of the Global North: lose sight of international solidarity and the critically important links with workers in the south at your peril.
Sullivan writes: “In the global north today we carry the world in our pockets, but we lose sight of the commodity chains connecting our everyday conveniences to the rest of the world. Even our activist efforts too often assume that radicalism flows outward from the north, not the other way round.
“We might take a cue, however, from the subjects of this book, who understood clearly how their struggles were related to wider systems of racial subordination, labour exploitation, and imperialism and who fought tirelessly to do something about it.”
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Categories: Caribbean, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, North America, United States