3 - Stopping “Creole Bolshevism”

Summary

Chapter 3 pairs the expansion of liberal and religious solutions to working-class problems with increasing labor radicalism in Cuba. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Catholic church and Cuban government created institutions to help domestic servants and to institutionalize education in domestic sciences for young women. The 1910s were also marked by phenomena that challenged these charity and education-based initiatives: rapidly increasing Caribbean migration to Cuba, growing labor unrest, and the feminist movement. These contradictory trends all found expression in the experiences of and discourse surrounding domestic workers. During the revolutionary upheaval of 1933, domestic workers acted in solidarity with other workers, helping to occupy mills and demanding increased formal attention to their labor. This chapter also considers the politics of the archives and how domestic workers were written out of stories of labor resistance at the very moment such resistance occurred.