2 - Leaving US-Occupied Haiti

Summary

In 1931, African American writer Langston Hughes and a companion named Zell Ingram boarded a ship headed from Haiti to Cuba. The two men had run short on money during their travels and could only afford deck passage. As a result, they rode to Cuba among Haitian agricultural workers. Hughes’ recorded experiences remain the only written account of the journey that so many Haitians had undertaken during the previous three decades.

Passage on the uncovered upper deck of a steamship was cheap but it was not comfortable. During the day, the Caribbean heat made its metal surface hot “like a griddle” and painful to the touch. Sunset brought new challenges:

Crossing the Windward Passage, in the middle of the night while we were asleep on deck, the ship ran headlong into a sudden September squall … With dozens of other deck passengers, we were rain-soaked, wind-tossed, and in danger of being washed off the open deck into the sea by the mounting waves. Finally the chief mate allowed us all a crowded shelter between decks where the ship's supplies, ropes and chains, were stored. There, with some fifty seasick peasants squatting in the dark waiting for day, the heat and stench were almost unbearable.

Hughes and Ingram emerged from below deck to meet Cuban officials in the port of Santiago de Cuba. As foreigners without funds or work contracts, they faced the brunt of Cuban immigration laws.

The immigration authorities did not know what to make of two American Negroes traveling on the open deck, unable to display between us as much as fifty dollars. They argued that only sugar cane workers traveled in that fashion. Therefore, since we had no working permits, they refused to allow us on Cuban soil until we posted bonds. We were consigned to Santiago's “Ellis Island,” a jail-like fortress in the harbor, zooming with mosquitoes, crawling with bedbugs, and alive with fleas … We were released only on the condition that we cross the island immediately, embark at once for Florida, and not stop anywhere to work in Cuba.

Langston Hughes experienced the state's efficient administration of a highly regulated system of border controls. But he arrived during the last year of legal migration to Cuba in a political and legal context that was distinct from previous years.