Caribbean Migrants in Panama and Cuba, 1851-1927: The Struggles, Opposition and Resistance of Jamaicans of African Ancestry

Introduction Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) that propagated programs of advancement for Africans in the Americas was organized in 1914 in Jamaica and later in 1916 in Harlem, USA. It is from the new headquarters in Harlem that the UNIA would mushroom into a worldwide organization fighting for the rights of Africans in the Diaspora and Africa to define, decide and control their destiny. Tony Martin, John Hendrick Clark, Amy Jacques-Garvey, Rupert Lewis and several other Garvey scholars highlight in their numerous studies that the problems of unemployment, discrimination, white terrorism and other oppressive conditions that confronted Blacks throughout the Americas helped to stimulate an interest in the programs of the UNIA among Africans across the Diaspora who were in search of protection against exploitation and terrorist acts that were fixtures of capitalist enterprises. In Latin America the UNIA appealed to Black migrant workers from British Caribbean colonial societies. Like Blacks in the United States, Afro-Caribbean (people of African heritage from or living in or around the Caribbean) workers were bested by discriminatory, terrorist and exploitive acts committed by white persons in pursuit of capital. Therefore, they found solace in the message of Marcus Garvey and in the programs of the UNIA, and like the African-American labor force, the Afro-Caribbean workers of Latin America were formally enslaved persons or persons born in the immediate years following the acts of emancipation. In the British Caribbean two emancipations occurred, the first in 1834 that ended slavery and the second in 1838 which ended apprenticeship. Hence, Caribbean peoples of African ancestry shared a commonality with African-Americans in that after emancipation they continued to experience exploitation of their persons by capital and industry. To confront the abuse they faced, Afro-Caribbean persons resisted in several fashions, and migration was used in conjunction with political agitation. And thus, in the context of this discourse, migration will be assessed as an option opted by Afro-Caribbean persons to escape the oppression of a post-emancipated society. Also, it will be argued that in favor of leaving the Caribbean to labor in American industries in the Spanish speaking Americas, Afro-Caribbean persons were leaving a bad situation to find a better situation, but instead they found themselves in a worst position. Hence, they were 'jumping out of the frying pan' and into the fire. This paper will discuss the migration of person of African ancestry from the Caribbean with an emphasis on the Jamaican migrants to the Latin American in the countries of Panama and Cuba. In addition, the study will examine the development of the Afro-Jamaican (Jamaicans of African ancestry) into radical workers under the auspices of the UNIA, and in order to fully understand the migrant reality of Afro-Jamaicans, the socio-economic factors provoking the stream of migrations from Jamaica is discussed. Afro-Jamaican Migration to Latin America: Contributory Factors At the root of the reasons for migration was the Afro-Jamaican perception that earning a living wage was more possible in Latin America and that the social and economic complexities in Panama and Cuba were new grounds for at least the first wave of Afro-Jamaican migrants. Still, when knowledge of the reality of these locations filtered into Jamaica through letters and returnees, people continued to trek to Latin America in droves. But why did Afro-Jamaicans continue to relocate after learning of the racial oppression and exploitation in Latin America? In grappling with answers for this question it is reasonable to speculate that many could not imagine anything worst or comparable to Jamaica's post-emancipation reality that possessed limited avenues of social advancement, and more importantly, most Afro-Jamaicans consciously realized that chances of surviving Jamaica's harsh economic and social order was pegged heavily to working outside of the island. …