Mavericks or Misfits? Irish Railroad Workers in Cuba - 1835-1844

Abstract

Archival records of Irish migration to Cuba describe a colony of “irlandeses” contracted in New York in 1835 to work for the Cuban Railway Commission. Contract labourers from Ireland and the Canary Islands were forced into a brutal work regime under Spanish military rule where any attempt to abscond was treated as desertion punishable by prison or execution. I argue that social formations and forms of struggle in the creation of a landless proletariat lay the ground in generating the conduct of subaltern resistance in this encounter between ‘a roving proletariat’ and intersecting British and Iberian systems of colonial labour. Counter modern social formations imported and adapted to the ‘new world’ are further analysed drawing on postcolonial theories which frame mobile transitory labour as an intrinsic, if recalcitrant, element in the history of capitalist expansion.