Cuban Sugar Industry: Transnational Networks and Engineering Migrants in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba

摘要

The story of Cuba's maquinistas is in many ways the story of migrant workers the world over. Drawn to Cuba to work primarily in the expanding sugar industry, they arrived to find a society in the midst of vast economic, political and social transformations. The expansion of steam technology in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century meant that Cubans were especially eager to capitalise on the skilled labour that the migrants could offer in the production of sugar as well as in other industries. It did not, however, mean that maquinistas were readily accepted or integrated into the larger milieu, or that they even held any desire to integrate into Cuban society. Instead, the lives of maquinistas reveal the polarising debates over slavery, sugar and independence that were taking place in Cuba, as well as the larger, global struggles and political processes shaping the mid-nineteenth-century island.