Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

[Morwen Edhelwen]

OK, don't know whether this is the right subforum to post this, but-

So, I'm writing a story. It's alternate history (dieselpunk) set in Honduras in the 1940s-50s and the plot involves the United Fruit Company (UFCO) who controlled banana plantations in the Caribbean lowlands of Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as well as Colombia and the Dominican Republic. UFCO contracted a lot of West Indian workers- mostly Jamaican- to work its banana plantations. Anyone heard about this before?

[Wahalla]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

yes

[Morwen Edhelwen]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

I've got no idea how to get hold of primary sources on this topic.
Has anyone on this forum researched this topic in detail? If you have, how did you get hold of sources? Is this topic common knowledge in Jamaica? I was thinking someone here might have a personal connection- an older relative or someone known to them who was contracted to a plantation somewhere in Central America (probably not though- pretty slim chance).

[Wahalla]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

My Gran mothers sister ended up in Columbia is all i know in the 1930s. As a starting point I suggest that u visit Negro With A Hat. The very good Garvey Biography. Look at his travels and time in central America.
Jamaicans have been migrating to central america for a long time. we were there on the fren h attempt to cut the Panama Canal and the Nicaragua canal. As well as the attempt to set up sugar plantations in central america. The Jamaican diaspora in Panama is known. But the one in Ni aragua is ignored.
Headley and Dudley Thompson was born in Panama


Note Jamaicans have been travelling to central America for a long time. Pre Columbian. When Cortez landed at Vera Cruz it was Jamaicans who were his Trans lators. Infact there was once a theory that La Chingada was Cuban or Jamaican. In fact Diaz mentioned a canoe with a female Jamaican on a canoe with two locals off Campache

A cousin of mine was reputed to be Sandinos cook. There was aJamaican with Walker, (OK west indian).


My critisism of ur project is that u r focused on the 30. that is relatively late in this process.

Personally i recall conversations with people of relatives dying in central america. But this was the 70s the post service qws crap and this sort oc news was slow.

u forgot Cuba. Rita was born in Cuba. The most famous Cuban in the 70 and 80 after castro had Jamaican parents. Theophilo Stevenson.


But dont listen to me, I am unconsious sell out who is stupid.

[Morwen Edhelwen]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

Did she work on a plantation?

[evanovitch]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

Institute of Jamaica....Universtity Library will provide nuff info if u know how to research...United Fruit Company was one of the primary beneficiaries of then US big-stick foreign policy...many say it influenced creation of said policy...on our island said company was even represented by our first Premier n National Hero, Norman Manley....the history related to that country n fruit production n the advent of trade unions is fascinating....i have alluded to the company pon yah over the years....wish i had my home library up an running not in storage..i could recommend actual books but like i said, the above-mentioned will provide info...i used it back in the days for A Levels West Indian history....nuff info out deh..good luck

came back to seh u should look into the letters of Bustamante...he was a thorn in their sides and LOVED to write letters to the Gleaner re his fights wid dem ...he also travelled thru central and SA, hence his spanish name he adopted....i do have a copy of his letters somewhere about the house...bought a new copy on a recent trip to Ja...also Gleaner archives should help u somewhat..the Gleaner is centuries old in Jamaica

[evanovitch]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

http://www.mayaparadise.com/united_fruit_company.htm

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">&quot;It [United Fruit] began with enviable connections to the Eisenhower administration. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his former New York law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had long represented the company. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, had served on UFCO's board of trustees. Ed Whitman, the company's top public relations officer, was the husband of Ann Whitman, President Eisenhower's private secretary. (Ed Whitman produced a film, &quot;Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas,&quot; that pictured UFCO fighting in the front trenches of the cold war.) The fruit firm's success in linking the taking of its lands to the evil of international communism was later described by one UFCO official as &quot;the Disney version of the episode.&quot; But the company's efforts paid off. It picked up the expenses of journalists who traveled to Guatemala to learn United Fruit's side of the crisis, and some of the most respected North American publications - including the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New Leader - ran stories that pleased the company. A UFCO public relations official later observed that his firm helped condition North American readers to accept the State Department's version of the Arbenz regime as Communist-controlled and the U.S.-planned invasion as wholly Guatemalan.&quot; (Quoted from Inevitable Revolutions - The United States in Central America by Walter La Feber, 2nd ed. 1993, pp. 120-121.</div></div>

[evanovitch]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3788591...i.e Journal of Social History &gt;
Vol. 28, No. 4, Summer, 1995 &gt;
Afro-Jamaican Tradition...

<span style="font-weight: bold">Chomsky, A. 1995. Afro-Jamaican Traditions and Labor organizing on United Fruit Company Plantations in Costa Rica, 1910. Journal of social History. 28 (4) 837-856</span>


<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Between 1900 and 1913 some 20,000 Jamaicans migratied to Costa Rica ,attracted by the newly -established United Fruit Company's banana plantations....</div></div>

<span style="font-weight: bold">Afro-Jamaican traditions and labor organizing on United Fruit Company plantations in Costa Rica, 1910

by Avi Chomsky
</span>
.

.
While Costa Rica's reputation of being the most pacific and homogeneous of the countries of Latin America is not entirely undeserved, historians have increasingly called this view into question. Recent works have documented inequalities in land tenure, concentrations of power, and social struggles which make Costa Rica look more like its Central American neighbors than had previously been assumed.(1)

Left out of the consensual view of Costa Rican history, in particular, have been social and political developments in the country's Atlantic Coast province of Limon. Central America's Atlantic coast has traditionally been more closely linked to the Caribbean than to the rest of the isthmus, and Limon's tropical rainforests have remained isolated from Costa Rica's cool, coffee-growing highlands until the present. However, in the late nineteenth century U.S.-based companies began to build railroads and plant bananas in Limon, recruiting workers primarily from Jamaica. Thus the society which developed in Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black Jamaican workers, with a culture and history quite distinct from the rest of Costa Rica, although inevitably intertwined.(2) In particular, the extreme polarization of race and class on the Atlantic Coast contrasts sharply with the more homogeneous central valley.



Although Costa Rican nationalists and anti-imperialists have protested the United Fruit Company's domination of the Atlantic Coast for close to a century, they have generally had little contact with the Jamaican banana workers themselves.(3) This paper focuses on these workers and seeks to uncover the ways in which they attempted to challenge the presumably dominant plantation system by creating a very different kind of life and society in its shadows. The workers brought with them a rich cultural tradition, based on their African background and their generations of plantation work under slavery for the British, which became the basis for organizations and collective action which allowed them to escape from, or to resist, Company domination. This culture of resistance encompassed several apparently contradictory elements: a British identity and a faith in the British Crown as the protector of the slave or worker's interests; involvement in Protestant Non-Conformist sects; and belief and participation in African-based religious forms.(4) In particular, I seek to illuminate the ways in which culture, belief systems and everyday forms of resistance grow into, or intersect with, those areas more commonly studied by labor historians: working-class organizations, unions, and strikes. I focus on the first labor union formed by the UFCO's Jamaican workers, and a three-week strike it led in late 1910, as a window into the lives and culture of the workers.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Between 1900 and 1913 some 20,000 Jamaicans migrated to Costa Rica, attracted by the newly-established United Fruit Company banana plantations. The earliest migrants were single men who lived in Company barracks, but soon families followed and a thriving Jamaican community developed in the Limon area.(5) Through the late 1920s the UFCO maintained a core of some 5,000 Jamaican </span>workers, along with some 2,000 native Costa Ricans, while many others worked as tenants or contractors for the UFCO or for large Costa Rican planters. These migrants were part of a stream of West Indians who left in the decades after emancipation when depression in the sugar industry and unavailability of land for alternative cultivation made subsistence impossible at home.(6) As in Panama, where they went to work on the railroad and canal-building projects, many Jamaicans were mobile and in-and out-migration were high, but by the early 1900s a fairly stable community had developed as well.

The UFCO faced a myriad of difficulties in establishing a labor force to grow its bananas. Finding &quot;free&quot; labor to work in plantation agriculture has been notoriously difficult throughout the history of the Americas, yet the Company had to somehow recruit workers. Until the 1920s, few Costa Ricans were attracted to the coast.

<span style="font-weight: bold">The Jamaicans who came to Costa Rica were mostly second-generation ex-slaves (slavery was abolished in Jamaica in the 1830s), </span>and came from a cultural tradition which shared both an aversion to what they considered slave-like about plantation agriculture, and a language, religion and organized social life developed to survive, mitigate or challenge these &quot;slave-like&quot; conditions. The solutions that the workers in Costa Rica sought to the challenges confronting them have strong parallels in the Jamaican slave tradition. Workers wanted access to land, for both subsistence and market production. They tried to maximize their independence with respect to the plantation, and they forged social ties outside of plantation domination in their families, communities, organizations, and religions, both Christian and African. In particular, Afro-Jamaican religious tradition which encompassed Protestant Non-conformism and obeah and myalism - two African-based religious forms which flourished among the slaves, and which was a major factor behind a number of slave and post-slavery rebellions in Jamaica - played a crucial role in labor organizing in Costa Rica. The Jamaicans in Costa Rica, as had the slaves in Jamaica, attempted in both confrontational and accommodationist ways to develop in the shadows of the plantation a system which satisfied their material and spiritual needs.

Under ordinary conditions, slaves and workers leave few records of their own about their activities. Activities which challenge the social order are especially likely to remain invisible, because workers take pains to conceal them from those who are maintaining the records. It is only when a challenge becomes overt, as in the case of strikes, that the record becomes fuller. Even so, hostile accounts in Company and government records make it difficult to discern what workers were really doing and thinking during a strike. Nonetheless, the written record on strikes in Limon allows us to piece together many aspects of workers' lives and culture.

Until 1910, strikes on UFCO plantations were sporadic, short-lived and generally unsuccessful. Most of them took place among workers in newly-opened land, where conditions were the most onerous, and were carried out by newly-arrived workers, who did not have the infrastructure of family or community support which older workers had developed and which could act as a cushion in hard times. Newly arrived workers could also have been given an unrealistic picture of what awaited them in Costa Rica by a labor contractor in Jamaica, as we shall see was the case in 1910. Also, new workers did not yet have an investment in their life in Costa Rica. Although the chances of a strike's success may have been slim, they probably felt that they had much less to lose than did established workers.

Several factors militated against any sort of worker organization. Migrant workers are generally reluctant to organize because of vulnerability to repression, high turnover, and a common desire to earn some money and move on, rather than struggle for improved conditions. In the absence of any sort of union, it was not surprising that the Company was able to quickly break any strikes which did occur. For example, when 7 dockworkers declared themselves on strike in 1904, the Company brought in 165 laborers from outlying plantations within a few hours to finish their task. The strikers were suspended.(7) The Company's reaction also suggests why strikes were not more frequent among its workers.

But by 1910 the Jamaican community of Limon had developed a complex social life of churches, newspapers, mutual aid societies, and lodges, all outside of Company control. These provided a strong institutional network for the Artisans and Labourers' Union, founded in January of that year with 2,000 members, in response to a supervisor beating two Jamaican workers.(8) The union members described themselves as &quot;workers and farmers [agricultores],&quot; and in many ways the union appears to have been more of a cross-class alliance of Jamaicans (hence its name, Artisans and Labourers' Union) than a class-based alliance of workers. No Costa Rican workers participated. Nonetheless, the union signalled a major shift in worker consciousness and in workers' ability to seriously challenge the Company's domination and to have a voice in determining their work conditions. It also threatened to undermine the Company's ability to mobilize strikebreakers.


In the early days of its existence, the Union's main function was to provide mutual aid and organize social functions, along the lines of the Jamaican churches, lodges and Friendly Societies in Costa Rica. It also ran a cooperative store or commissary,(9) and a bar where meetings were held. The union store is a good example of how workers sought ways to improve their situation without directly placing any demands on the Company. The Company generally paid workers with coupons which could be used only in Company commissaries. Other local stores discounted the coupons 20-25% off their marked value, the rate at which the Company would redeem them (in merchandise). If a worker wanted to be paid in cash, he would often have to wait up to two weeks after the end of the month to receive his pay; coupons could be obtained in advance. Whenever workers voiced their complaints against the Company, the coupon system ranked high on the list.(10) The union commissary may have circumvented these problems by allowing members to buy on credit, thus enabling them to wait for their pay in cash instead of accepting coupons.

The union's first actual demand to the Company occurred on July 16, 1910, when it notified the UFCO that it intended to declare August 1, Jamaican Emancipation Day, a holiday, and refrain from working that day. Emancipation Day, a public holiday in Jamaica, held great symbolic importance - not only affirming the difference in workers' status from that of slaves, but also asserting a Jamaican identity through a celebration unacknowledged by either the UFCO or Costa Rica.(11) The fact that the union's first demand concerned national identity and dignity rather than wages or working conditions is further indication of the race/ethnic rather than the class nature of the union.

The following day the Company locked out some 600 workers identified as belonging to the Union and told them that they were relieved of their positions.(12) The Company thus turned what had begun as a social and cultural celebration into an issue of labor discipline and control, which in turn suggested to the workers that their freedom still had severe limitations.



Both the Company and the workers turned immediately to the Costa Rican government for support. The workers' protest focused on pay issues, in particular, the system of hourly wages which resulted in workers never receiving the daily wage they had been guaranteed. They also protested long waits before the monthly pay check arrived, the coupon system, and the money discounted for the Company hospital. In addition, they denounced merciless supervisors who &quot;turn the respect and obedience of the workers into a perfect slavery. They have them jailed and everything that comes into the heads of such lords [caciques], they engage in physical abuse [torturar en el trozo], abolished by law, orders which are followed by the Police Officers, because since they are subsidized by the Allied Companies, they are afraid of losing this bonus [sobresueldo].&quot;(13) The Company, for its part, complained that the union &quot;is nothing less than a threat to the industrial interests of the country.&quot;(14) It named three of the union's leaders as &quot;very dangerous&quot; and asked that they be deported.(15) But the government had little institutional presence on the isolated Atlantic Coast and was slow to respond, so the Company quickly resorted to its own power.

Its next attempt to break the union consisted of sending its recruiting agent to St. Kitts (one of the Leeward Islands, another British West Indian colony) to import a large number of workers who could replace Jamaican union members. These 725 men arrived, on a ship licensed to carry 300, on November 16. The Company offered them 70 cents a day (Jamaicans were then receiving $1 per day), and immediately scattered them among outlying farms.

The efforts of the Jamaican unionists, combined with the unifying force of an underlying Afro-Caribbean tradition which the Jamaicans and St. Kitts men shared, however, allowed the two groups to overcome what Michael Conniff has called the &quot;interisland jealousy&quot; that undermined labor organizing among Panama Canal workers.(16) Instead of despising the St. Kitts men as scabs, a number of union activists made it their business to contact them immediately upon their arrival and to convince them to refuse to work while Jamaican union members were locked out. The St. Kitts men found out right away that the wages they were being offered were substantially below what the Jamaicans were earning, and this became one of their principal grievances in refusing to work. In addition, they complained that the pay, food and quarters that they were provided were far below what had been promised by the recruiting agent. According to the British Consul, Jamaican &quot;agitators . . . told the St. Kitts men that the country was unhealthy&quot; and provoked panic among them. &quot;The Jamaicans in Limon were caring for the St. Kitts men, some in good faith, but some also with the idea of working them up to fight the authorities,&quot; the Consul went on.(17)

there are 13 other pages...if u interested i will copy and paste...

[evanovitch]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

The St. Kitts men fled back to the city of Limon from the farms where they had been assigned, and demanded redress from the British Vice Consul in Limon, the Costa Rican government, the Company, the Union, and prominent members of the Jamaican community. These different actors' varying reactions determined the course of the strike, and the future of the union.

Once the St. Kitts men's strike had begun, the Costa Rican government overcame any lingering hesitation it had felt about supporting the Company. By December 1 it had sent 250 soldiers and 50 extra police to Limon, and posted guards all along the railway line to ensure that no more of the laborers could reach the city. The Governor also informed the men on November 24th that &quot;anybody who is found not working tomorrow 25th November will be locked up and punished for vagrancy.&quot;(18) The arrival of an American gunboat in the Limon harbor backed up the notice, but this only further milled the Jamaican community around the workers and against the UFCO. The Jamaican-owned Limon Times editorialized: &quot;We are all British Subjects . . . we all belong to a world-wide Empire, and on the strength of that assertion, all British Subjects have every right to be treated with the greatest amount of respect; and should not be so subjected to American aggression.&quot;(19)



The workers made several appeals to the British Vice Consul, C. G. McGrigor, to intervene and arrange for the men to be transported back to St. Kitts, but as the Times repeatedly pointed out: &quot;What can one expect when he is an employee of the United Fruit Company?&quot;(20) When this route proved fruitless, the workers went over McGrigor's head to the Consul in San Jose and then to the Minister in Panama. The Consul, aware of how discredited McGrigor had become, arrived from San Jose on November 29, and issued a public notice affirming his support for the Company.

You and all British subjects here are under the authority of the PRESIDENT OF COSTA RICA, and the Officials named by him, and I hereby order you to obey such authorities absolutely.

The laws of this Country oblige all men to work; and for those who refuse, the Vagrancy Acts are in force, and such men are liable to be arrested and taken to any part of the Country, and there forced to work.

You are hereby directed to return, as free men, to work at the farms of the United Fruit Company . . .

I advise you to work as free men, and save money, rather than to be forced to work, and have nothing.(21)

Small wonder that the workers often wondered whether the difference between slavery and &quot;free labor&quot; was really so great after all.

The workers then circulated a petition which they sent to the Minister in Panama, protesting the attitude of the local British authorities, but there is no record of any response to this. Despite this lack of support from above, however, the St. Kitts strikers remained firm for three weeks, and generated substantial support among the Jamaican community.

The workers' apparent faith in appeal to ever-higher British authorities has several possible explanations. Scholars sometimes attribute such faith to a kind of false consciousness: the socially weak and disempowered share in a belief system which serves to maintain their low position in the existing hierarchy, thus supporting the interests of the more powerful.(22) In fact the powerful are able to maintain their position partially through their ability to impose their ideology on the rest of society. The Jamaican and St. Kitts workers, however, did not seem to suffer from this sort of false consciousness. They certainly were not disposed to accept British authorities' decisions when these contradicted what the workers believed to be just. The British Consul recognized quite well that his position would not be enough to ensure the goodwill of the workers, and felt obliged to ask for police protection while he was in Limon.(23)

Another possible explanation is workers knew quite well that the British authorities had more interest in maintaining the existing order than in upholding workers' rights, but were consciously manipulating the hypocrisies in the system which claimed to protect them. The workers' challenge to British authorities to uphold their rights could have been strictly instrumental: regardless of their degree of faith in the outcome, it was worth pursuing all possible routes to their goal. More cynical workers may have also felt that a failed attempt to mobilize British authority on their behalf would convince the more credulous of the need for more militant action. The workers could easily have made their appeals to Consul McGrigor in this spirit.

[evanovitch]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

There is reason to suspect, however, that many workers did believe that the British authorities would act in their interest, and that this belief was based on more than just &quot;false consciousness.&quot; Abigail Bakan notes that belief in the British Crown as a champion of slave, worker and peasant rights was a constant in Jamaican radical ideology from the colonial period until the 1940s and terms this a &quot;mixed&quot; rather than a false consciousness.(24) In fact, in several key instances of rebellion in Jamaica, the Crown proved that its intervention could overturn the interests of the planter class: after the 1831 &quot;Baptist War,&quot; when the Crown abolished slavery, and after the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, when the new Crown Colony government proved much more concerned with peasant interests than the planter-dominated Assembly.(25) Thus, especially in the nineteenth century, slaves and peasants often correctly perceived the Crown as antagonistic to the will of the planters. In Costa Rica, Jamaican workers had even more justification for believing that the Crown or its agents would defend its citizens against a US company or the Costa Rican government.

In fact the workers used quite different language when appealing to Costa Rican president Jimenez to intervene on their behalf: they accused the &quot;powerful Foreign Companies [Empresas Eztranjeras (sic)]&quot; of &quot;stomping even on the national spirit [pisoteando hasta el espiritu nacional].&quot;(26) This too was probably a combination of instrumentalism - exhausting all possibilities - and a not-altogether-impossible hope that Jimenez would uphold his own anti-imperialist rhetoric and stand up to the Company - as indeed he did on other occasions. Thus the workers did not simply accept or mimic the dominant ideology, rather, they used the elements of that ideology which served their own interests, and challenged those in power to live up to their lofty rhetoric. And the workers proved quite adept at adjusting the language of their appeals according to the audience.

Many established members of the Jamaican community played a more supportive or at least more ambiguous role during the strike than did the British and Costa Rican authorities. The Times took up a subscription to raise funds for food and clothing for the Leeward Island laborers,(27) and it printed numerous articles in favor of the strikers. The Costa Rican authorities reacted sharply against the paper, even briefly jailing its General Manager for having criticized the police.(28)



The workers also appealed to the local Protestant ministers to support their cause, with varying degrees of success. Both the Company and the Governor accused several of the local Protestant ministers of complicity in the strike.<span style="font-weight: bold"> However, the Protestant ministers actually played a decidedly ambiguous role in Costa Rica, just as they had in Jamaica</span>. An examination of the role of Protestant Non-conformism is especially illustrative of the sometimes paradoxical interconnections among differing forms of consciousness and action. Protestantism could lead to slave and worker docility as well as resistance, and to either individual or collective solutions to the problems facing the working classes. The various Protestant sects which ministered to the slaves starting in the late eighteenth century created an enormous tension within slave society because of their dual message, which acknowledged the slaves' humanity and promised a better world in the hereafter, at the same time as they preached obedience in this world. During times of protest and rebellion, both slaves and planters often believed that Non-conformist missionaries supported the slaves, even while their actions placed them firmly on the side of law and order.(29) In the early nineteenth century this tension was resolved in favor of slave resistance to a certain extent with the growth of Black Baptism, a syncretic form which incorporated African forms of worship - drumming, dancing and spirit possession - and, equally important, translated the missionaries' other-worldly message emphatically into the terms of this world. Black Baptists played leading roles in the slave rebellion of 1831-32 and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865.(30)

Like earlier plantation owners, the UFCO quickly realized the advantages that organized religion could bring to production, and built company churches and hired ministers to serve their workers. In 1906 one newspaper article commented that the

general conduct and character of the Jamaican laborers . . . shows how much the companies and private capitalists . . . owe to the . . . missionaries. . . . Without the Gospel following up those people the American racial idea would have created an insuperable barrier to any satisfactory adjustment in this country between the white man as capitalist and the black man as laborer. This, the preaching of the Gospel, has happily obviated and adjusted.(31)

[evanovitch]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

<span style="font-weight: bold">But by providing an institutional basis for maintaining Jamaican cultural ties and habits and an affirmation of the rights and humanity of workers, the various churches in Limon also formed the basis for the alternative society that the Jamaicans maintained in the shadow of the plantations. As in Jamaica, the plantation workers could sometimes interpret in subversive ways the message of the ministers and missionaries who preached resignation and obedience.(32)</span>

Four local ministers - at least two of them black - played visible roles during the strike. <span style="font-weight: bold">Reverends Glasspole (or Grasspole) and E. A. Pitt, both black Jamaicans, initially provided at least moral support for the strikers</span>,(33) but when the British Consul from San Jose insisted that the St. Kitts men end their strike Pitt appeared with him and reiterated the &quot;necessity of going to work at once.&quot;(34) A UFCO-employed minister, Reverend John Henderson, was &quot;politely asked to resign on some pretext or other&quot; after the strike because of his supposed support for the strikers.(35) Another minister, Reverend R. Waite-Smith, published several articles in the Times supporting the strikers and the union and attacking the Company with strong language. Waite-Smith escaped arrest only by seeking sanctuary in the church.(36) According to the Governor of Limon, the British Consul shared his view that &quot;those responsible for this [rebellious] attitude [among the strikers] are Reverend Waite-Smith and the other protestant ministers.&quot;(37) Thus as in nineteenth century Jamaica, Protestant ministers did, to a certain extent, support the aspirations of the plantation workers. But their support, while important, was not enough to swing the balance in favor of the workers.



The union itself was divided on the issue of supporting the St. Kitts men when they went on strike. Many union members clearly realized that creating ties of solidarity with the St. Kitts workers was a more constructive approach than simply rejecting them as scabs, and the militancy of the St. Kitts men themselves certainly contributed to making this approach a success. However, a number of union members, and in particular some of the leadership, were not pleased with the militant turn events had taken. Up until recently the union had served more as a sort of social club for Jamaicans; now it was suddenly involved in a bitter labor dispute, supporting strikers who were not even Jamaican.

Two of the leaders of the union abandoned it two weeks after the strike began. The President appears to have fled the country, carrying most of the union's funds with him. As the official leadership collapsed, however, some of the more militant members of the rank and file rose to take their places and, along with many of the St. Kitts workers, kept the strike alive.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Those who came to the fore during the 1910 strike - who replaced the union's official leaders, created ties of solidarity between the Jamaican and the St. Kitts workers, and through their words and actions, turned the strike into a strong and militant movement - were a curious combination of people. In addition to the black ministers, two were known as obeah-men. Charles Ferguson, the Jamaican who appears to have been the real ringleader of the strike, was known for his close relations with those who kept alive an African-based tradition of healing and supernatural power, in particular, obeah</span>. And his ties to an obeah-man from St. Kitts seem to have been crucial in allowing the two groups to unite. A closer look at some of these individuals reveals some of the links between alternative, Afro-Caribbean based cultural forms and political organizing.

Much more than the ministers or the British officials, Ferguson took the real leadership role in encouraging the St. Kitts men to strike, rallying the Jamaican community around them and resurrecting the union after its leadership fell apart. Ferguson was not a Company employee, but he was certainly an active member of the Jamaican community. He worked at various odd jobs in Limon, bookkeeping and translating, and also owned several properties, including a small business in Bocas del Toro (Panama).(38) There was wide-spread agreement about Ferguson's role in promoting the strike, and he was put on the new Executive Board of the Union that was formed on December 5. Workers called Ferguson the &quot;alma mater of the strike,&quot; because &quot;he didn't rest, he was always going from group to group perorating, in one, collecting signatures in another. . . .&quot;(39) Ferguson earned the nickname &quot;Consul&quot; by trying to fulfill the role that workers believed the Consul should have carried out. One worker explained that &quot;due to his harangues of oratory among the blacks he acquired the nickname of 'Consul' ... he used very harsh words against the English Consul and went around collecting signatures to present petitions to the English Minister in Panama, with the goal that the British Government come to intervene in this affair on the side of the St. Kitts Blacks.&quot;(40) The Company demanded that the government take action against him, in addition to the union officials and Joseph Nathan, the St. Kitts leader.

[evanovitch]

Re: Jamaican plantation workers- United Fruit Company

But it took months for Ferguson's case to be prosecuted, and the investigation that the government launched against him unveiled some of the links among the political, <span style="font-weight: bold">cultural and religious identifications of the Jamaican community. For what made Ferguson seem so threatening to the Company - and what made him such an effective leader to the workers - was not just the fact that he circulated a petition to the Minister in Panama. Ferguson was deeply enmeshed in a network made up of obeah-men and others with access to the supernatural, as well as labor organizers, who used their power to challenge the existing order on many levels. One UFCO foreman warned ominously that Ferguson was a &quot;dangerous element&quot; because of his &quot;influence among a certain class of people.&quot;(</span>41) The Costa Rican government, the British consular officials, and the UFCO all accused Ferguson, in addition to his role in the strike, of associating with other subversive Jamaicans: J. Washington Sterling, an obeah-man who was practicing medicine illegally in Limon, and Francis (nobody ever discovered his last name), whom the investigators referred to as a sorcerer [brujo]. The UFCO administration accused Ferguson and Sterling together and the Costa Rican authorities investigated and tried them together and finally expelled them from the country together.(42)

The government's investigation found many who were willing to testify against Ferguson - mostly Costa Rican officials, British officials, and UFCO management-level employees, though some Jamaicans cooperated as well. While Ferguson was accused primarily for his role as a labor organizer, his associate J. Washington Sterling's crimes were of a medical - and supernatural - nature. Sterling challenged the hegemony of the government and fruit company doctors by practicing medicine without a license. He also apparently tried to establish a pharmacy along with Charles Bryan, former Secretary of the Union, another connection between his world and that of the labor organizers. Ferguson's role, as Sterling's associate, was to recruit patients for him.(43) But Sterling was no ordinary doctor: he was an obeah-man who relied on supernatural as well as physical means for his cures, and whose powers extended beyond healing.



Obeah and myalism were the two African-based belief systems predominating in Jamaica in the eighteenth century. Both were clandestine, but myalism was a group worship, while obeah was usually a power invested in an individual obeah-man. Monica Schuler called myalism &quot;a powerful catalyst for African and Afro-Jamaican resistance to European values and control.&quot;(44) The Jamaican Black Baptist movement, which as we have seen was a driving force behind the 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica, was closely associated with myalism.(45) And myalism and Black Baptism have remained linked. A myalist revival in the 1840s followed the same geographical limits of Black Baptist Moses Baker's following,(46) and the 1860s revivalist movement which preceded the Morant Bay uprising of 1865 &quot;partook of the Myal tradition,&quot; and so &quot;could also be revolutionary.&quot;(47) A wave of pocomania revivalism, a nineteenth century African import, like myalism based on dance, drumming, singing and spirit possession, was closely associated geographically with the areas of rebellion in 1938 in Jamaica, carrying on the link of religious revivalism and rebellion.(48) Although there is no evidence of Black Baptist activity in Limon, myalism clearly had a thriving presence there in the period during and especially after the strike.

Obeah too was politically subversive from its first appearance. It was outlawed in Jamaica as early as 1760 for inspiring a slave rebellion in that year.(49) Orlando Patterson writes that

obeah functioned largely in the numerous rebellions of the slaves .... In the plotting of these rebellions the obeah-man was essential in administering oaths of secrecy, and, in cases, distributing fetishes which were supposed to immunize the insurgents from the arms of the whites.(50)

Also notable in the contemporary descriptions of both myalism and obeah is the medical importance that they held. Myal doctors often worked in plantation hospitals,(51) myal leaders were referred to as &quot;Doctor&quot;, for they were trained in medicinal herbs in Africa and &quot;served important medicinal functions.&quot;(52) The obeah-man was &quot;doctor, philosopher, and priest,&quot;(53) and &quot;sometimes exercised considerable power over a slave community in opposition to that of white medical practice.&quot;(54)

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Everybody interviewed from the UFCO Administrator to the British Consul E Nutter Cox to the workers - concurred in identifying Sterling as an obeah-man.(55) And it seems to have been Sterling and Ferguson's ties to obeah which allowed them to link up immediately with one of the St. Kitts men, Joseph Nathan, who was both a leader of the strike and, according to the UFCO, an obeah-man. In soliciting Nathan's expulsion from Costa Rica during the heat of the strike, the UFCO Administrator used language strikingly similar to that which the foreman had used against Ferguson when he wrote that Nathan was &quot;what the Jamaicans and Blacks of the 'Leeward Islands' call an 'Obeah man', and he has absolute influence over the others.&quot;(56) And it seems to have been Nathan's deportation, on December 7, that signalled the end of the strike.(57) Thus the two main leaders of the strike, one from Jamaica and one from St. Kitts, both had close ties to obeah. This could well have accounted for their ability to rally the workers around them, overcoming inter-island differences. This was probably how they managed to convince the St. Kitts workers to support, rather than undermine, the Jamaicans' union, and the Jamaicans to organize, rather than to despise, the St. Kitts workers.

In addition to the combination of fear and respect with which West Indians viewed obeah-men, they may well have had dimly-held notions or even very specific recollections, from stories passed down through the generations, of the supernatural ability of obeah-men to successfully challenge or even overturn the social order. In addition, the Afro-Jamaicans' shared yet clandestine adherence to a system of belief and collective ritual could provide, even more than the collective but open organizations like lodges and friendly societies, the foundation for organized resistance to those in power. The cultural tradition embodied in the two obeah-men was probably a major factor contributing to the strength of the movement.



The Protestant ministers and British consular officials were intermediate figures: outside of the workers' community, yet riot obviously allied with the Company either. The workers clearly felt that Crown representatives should support their struggle, and felt betrayed when they did not, as in the case of Vice-Consul McGrigor. This betrayal, while probably contributing to the eventual dissolution of the strike and the union, also helped to strengthen the African element. For men like Sterling, Ferguson and Nathan, who represented the African more than the British component of Afro-Caribbean culture, stood unequivocally on the side of the workers. Yet it is interesting that even Ferguson, with his close ties to obeah and the African tradition, emphasized appeals to Great Britain, rather than obeah, in his attempts to further the strike. Or it may be that Ferguson did invoke obeah, but in ways which eluded those who maintained the written record.(58)

By attributing such a crucial role to individuals with supernatural powers, the obeah tradition may have actually contributed to weakening the collective organization of the workers in the long run. This may be one reason why the strike eventually collapsed and why the workers were never able to successfully resurrect the union. If the power and unity of purpose of the group resides in one or two individuals, this disempowers the other members even while perhaps galvanizing the group with respect to its adversary, in this case the UFCO. The fact that Nathan's expulsion coincided with the breakdown in resolve among the St. Kitts workers lends support to this view.

The multifaceted role that religion could play in the community is further revealed by the wave of religious revivalism - public, mass religious meetings and healings, with the dancing, drumming and spirit possession characteristic of myalism, Black Baptism, and pocomania - which followed the demise of the union. As in Jamaica, religious revivalism in Limon seems to have had a continuous, if underground, existence. But the outburst in 1911-1912 stands out in size, variety and longevity. In June of 1911 the Times complained that followers of Sterling were engaging in &quot;vile practices [revival meetings] which have stirred the town during the past month the like of which has never been known in the previous history of Port Limon.&quot;(59) What made Sterling's followers leave the privacy of their homes and bring their religion in to the streets and yards, to the horror of Limon's Jamaican middle class?

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In Jamaica, scholars have found that outbursts of religious revivalism have preceded periods of social protest.(60) In Limon, there is little evidence of religious revivalism prior to the 1910 strike. Rather than an impetus to rebellion, religious revival in Limon seems to have been a reaction to the failure of a political movement.(61) It may also have been a reaction to the failure of the Nonconformists to fulfill the leadership roles the workers wanted them to. The two ministers who remained supportive of the workers - Reverend Henderson and Reverend Waite-Smith - both left Limon voluntarily shortly after the strike ended.(62) Ferguson and Sterling, in contrast, remained in the country until they were deported later in 1911, after pursuing every possible delaying tactic. Not only that, they both remained active in challenging the UFCO. Ferguson helped to organize another strike in April.(63) Both men were accused of aiding two of their friends who burglarized the Company railroad offices; Sterling allegedly used obeah to help the accused escape from prison afterwards.(64)

Thus the behavior of the various community leaders after as well as during the strike contributed to, or continued, workers' adherence to African rather than British traditions. At the same time, the lack of any outside or institutional system of support for organization based on this Afro-Caribbean tradition made it extremely vulnerable. Yet even with the union and the strike crushed, the community remained imbedded in the Afro-Caribbean religious tradition. Revivalism, however, though abhorrent to the Jamaican middle class, proved to be little threat to the UFCO or the Costa Rican authorities. In fact, by dividing the Jamaicans along class lines, it may have served the purposes of those who were threatened by the union.



The social institutions like schools, churches and clubs, which the Company fostered in its paternalism, interacted with other types of organization which were fully independent of Company control, like Lodges, newspapers, and friendly and mutual aid societies. These latter provided the basis for organized resistance. People on both sides of the strike, and divided over the legitimacy of Sterling and Ferguson's activities, were active members of Limon's various churches and lodges.(65) Interestingly, the coexistence of Protestantism, obeah and Masonry seemed to pose no conflicts to the workers. Their testimony during the government's investigation of Sterling and Ferguson makes it abundantly clear that most of them were members of lodges and churches as well as believers in obeah.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Evidence from one of the few novels written by a Jamaican Costa Rican </span>confirms this. The protagonist, a second generation Jamaican immigrant and a Protestant minister, married an obeah-man's daughter and felt no hesitation about consulting an obeah-man himself. His own father's advice, given on his deathbed, was that he should use the sign of his Lodge if he was ever in danger.(66) Part of the rite that his father-in-law (the obeah-man) instructed him to follow to undo an evil spell that a neighbor had cast on his fields was to repeat &quot;The Lord is great and strong&quot; seven times every day.(67) Thus the three traditions - Masonry, Protestantism and obeah - could easily coexist. What did appear to be in &quot;total conflict&quot; with the world of these three traditions was Western medicine, science, and what one learned in school.(68)

The events of 1910, important in their own right, also serve as a window into cultural traditions which are ordinarily invisible to the historian. The Artisans and Labourers' Union was one source of strength for the workers in 1910, but this strength was nourished by individuals like Charles Ferguson and Joseph Nathan who embodied the values and traditions of the community which had survived from their African past, molded by the experiences of plantation slavery. While the organized mutualism and unionism of the Jamaican workers have resembled the experience of European and U.S. workers in the early period of industrialization, the role of obeah-men in mobilizing the workers has its parallels in the slave rebellions of the Caribbean. The Company discovered the Christian religion, mutualism and even unionization to be acceptable (and occasionally even advantageous),(69) but it certainly never fomented the underground traditions of African belief systems, and when they became visible, both Costa Rican and British authorities and the Company always attacked them.

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Even the Jamaican community, despite its impressive solidarity behind the union and the St. Kitts workers, was divided when it came to obeah and myalism. The <span style="font-weight: bold">Jamaican-owned Limon Times, which had so vigorously denounced the Company </span>and the British authorities during the strike, had nothing but scorn for the &quot;crowds of the unwashed&quot; attending myalist ceremonies and the &quot;obnoxious vermins as these obeahmen.&quot;(70) Thus, strikingly, Afro-Caribbean cultural identity proved to be both the cement that held a multi-class Jamaican community together around the striking workers and, in the end, the issue which divided the community, apparently along class lines. For while Jamaican ministers and newspaper editors could support the workers in their struggle to maintain their cultural identity, their dignity, their rights as workers with respect to the Company, and their union, these respectable Jamaicans could not condone those aspects of Afro-Jamaican identity which proved most potentially subversive to the social order: obeah and myalism. These belief systems, perhaps because of their very clandestine quality, were able to nourish the strike when the workers were under attack from all sides.

In the best of times, UFCO workers' affirmation of Afro-Jamaican cultural identity constituted a form of everyday resistance to Company domination. The confrontation in 1910 grew directly out of the workers' attempts to celebrate this cultural identity. But as the confrontation escalated, fault lines became apparent in the apparently unified community. When everyday resistance grew into a movement which challenged the Company's right to complete control of the conditions of work, representatives of the established, public institutions of Jamaican cultural life abandoned the workers' cause rather than risk losing their respectability, and workers' resistance was driven underground. The underground aspects of Jamaican cultural identity - obeah and myalism - proved to be the only sources capable of sustaining support for open challenge to the social order.

History Department Lewiston, ME 04240

ENDNOTES

I wish to thank Cindy Forster and David McCreery for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.



1. See the Introduction to Lowell Gudmundson's Costa Rica Before Coffee (Baton Rouge, 1986) for a discussion of the &quot;white legend&quot; in Costa Rican historiography. Social histories which discuss labor struggles in Costa Rica include Marielos Aguilar, Carlos Luis Fallas: su epoca y sus luchas, (San Jose, 1983), Victor Hugo Acuna, La huelga bananera de 1934 (San Jose, 1978) and Los origenes de la clase obrera en Costa Rica: las huelgas de 1920 por la jornada de ocho horas (San Jose, 1986), Daniel Camacho et al., Desarrollo del movimiento sindical en Costa Rica (San Jose, 1985), Vladimir de la Cruz, Las luchas sociales en Costa Rica (San Jose, 1984), and Los martires de Chicago y el 1 de mayo de 1913 (San Jose, 1985), Arnoldo Ferreto, La huelga bananera 1934 (San Jose, 1987), Mario Oliva Medina, Artesanos y obreros costarricenses (San Jose, 1985), and Carlos Luis Fallas Monge, El movimiento obrero en Costa Rica, 1830-1902 (San Jose, 1983). Studies of Costa Rica's Atlantic coast, or of the West Indian community, inevitably touch on social or labor struggles, without necessarily exploring them in depth. See Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte, &quot;Family, Household and Intergenerational Relations in a 'Jamaican' Village in Limon, Costa Rica,&quot; in Stanford N. Gerber, ed., The Family in the Caribbean (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1973 ), Jeffrey Casey Gaspar, Limon, 1880-1940 (San Jose, 1979), Ronald N. Harpelle, &quot;West Indians in Costa Rica: Racism, Class and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Community&quot; (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1992), Charles Koch, &quot;Jamaican Blacks and their Descendants in Costa Rica,&quot; Social and Economic Studies 26:3 (September 1977): 339-61, Carlos Melendez and Quince Duncan, El negro en Costa Rica (San Jose, 1981), Paula Palmer, &quot;What Happen&quot;: A Folk History of Costa Rica's Talamanca Coast (San Jose, 1977), Trevor Purcell, Banana Fallout: Class, Color, and Culture among West Indians in Costa Rica (Los Angeles, 1993). Two recent articles have documented the events of the 1910 strike: Elisavinda Echeverri-Gent's &quot;Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early Days of the Banana Industry in Costa Rica and Honduras,&quot; Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (May 1992), 275-308 and Carlos Hernandez, &quot;Los inmigrantes de Saint Kitts: 1910, un capitulo en la historia de los conflictos bananeros costarricenses,&quot; Revista de Historia 23 (1991), 191-240. Even those authors who have written about actual strikes, however, have failed to discern the rich organizational life of the West Indian workers, and the way in which social and cultural organizations provided the basis for labor activity firmly rooted in Afro-Caribbean culture. Gudmundson has characterized Costa Rican labor history as &quot;pre-Thompsonian&quot; because of its focus on leadership, politics and institutions rather than on working class lives and culture (Elizabeth Fonseca C. and Mario Samper K., &quot;Entrevista a Lowell Gudmundson,&quot; Revista de Historia 16 [1988], 28).