by
Stuart Hall
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Film was already one of my abiding passions. It seemed to me the most innovative of the modern arts. I had always had a passionate addiction to the movies, and as a youth in Kingston I saw on Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre everything from Hollywood that found its way to Jamaica: westerns, melodramas, thrillers, musicals and film noir; Bogart and Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, the lot. This passion continued in Oxford. We went to the cinema two or three times a week. My first experiences of Continental cinema included Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. They were a revelation. I realize now that this combination of arguing about literary criticism, reading modern literature, especially with the Americans, following the Caribbean novel and poetry, going to the movies, listening to and playing jazz meant that I began to construct a sort of intellectual counter-life to Oxford, more appropriate to my growing sense of being a radical outsider, a feeling which deepened as I came to the end of my time as an undergraduate.
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From 1956 until I made the move to Birmingham in 1964, ‘normal’ life was suspended by my political activity: by my editing ULR and, from 1960, New Left Review (NLR); by the larger attempts to build around these publications social movements, eventually organized by the creation of the New Left Clubs; by the long and arduous struggle to get the ideas we were generating mobilized, and by our attempt to activate them inside the Labour Party. At the same time, as we experienced what felt to us as a thaw in the Cold War, we invested great energies in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which represented a strategic social movement in its own right. Suez and Hungary had fractured the old politics, and the carapace of the Cold War had been – temporarily, as it turned out – shattered. Out of this emerged our ‘between/against both camps’ position and the hope for the creation of an independent, popular Left politics.
I am in the middle of my discussion about politics and I’m having to explain my shifting relations to the concept of culture. I make no apology for this. This journey took me to an understanding of culture as the signifying dimension of human practice. In Althusser’s terms, culture exists as one of the founding instances of every social formation, without which societies cannot exist as such.
From the vantage of today, for a different generation, our investments in ULR and then the founding of the NLR might seem parochial. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. We laboured long and hard to seize the moment, as it were, and to recast the Left so that we weren’t left behind by history. We endeavoured to keep our eyes on the prize.
By then I knew the traditions of socialist politics in England. But I hadn’t been formed in them, like Raymond Williams or Edward Thompson. I was a neophyte among them. Can anyone imagine what it must have been like being alongside these luminaries? Editorial boards were a nightmare for me. I’d indicate the possible contents of the next issue and then hold up my hands before the storm broke and the fathers spoke!
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I remember how the cane cutters lived: in one-room shacks called bohios. Dirt floors, a pot in the middle of the room, no windows, no plumbing, no electricity. The only light was what came through the open doorway and filtered into the cracks between the thatched palm walls. They slept in hammacas. They were squatters, but the company tolerated it because they had to live somewhere during the harvest. The rest of the year—the dead time, they called it—they were desolajos. I don’t know what they did. Wandered the countryside looking for work and food, I guess. In the shantytown where the cane cutters lived—it’s called a batey—there were naked children running everywhere. None of those people had shoes, and their feet had hard shells of calloused skin around them. They cooked their meals outdoors, on mangrove charcoal. Got their water from a spigot at the edge of the cane fields. They had to carry their water in hand buckets, but the company let them take as much as they wanted. It was certainly a better deal than the mine workers got over in Nicaro. Those people were employees of the U.S. government, and they had to get their water from the river—the Levisa River—where they dumped the tailings from the nickel mine. The Nicaro workers drank from the river, bathed in the river, washed their clothes in the river. If you wash your bike in the Levisa River after it rains, it gets shiny clean. That’s a Cuban thing. I don’t know why, but it really works. After it rained, everybody was down there, boys and grown men wading into the river in their underwear, washing cars and bicycles.
Dirt shacks, no running water—the way those people lived, it’s just how life was to me. I was a child. Mother didn’t like it, but Daddy reminded her that the company paid them higher wages than any Cuban-owned sugar operation. Mother thought it was just terrible the way the Cuban plantations did business. It broke her heart, the idea of a race of people exploiting their own kind. The cane cutters were all Jamaicans, of course—not a single one of them was Cuban—but I knew what she meant: native people taking advantage of other native people, brown against black, that kind of thing. She was proud of Daddy, proud of the fact that the United Fruit Company upheld a certain standard, paid better wages than they had to, just to be decent. She said she hoped it would influence the Cubans to treat their own kind a bit better.
lmao
In Daddy’s office at company headquarters there was a big map of Oriente. Oriente was where we lived, and it was Cuba’s largest, poorest, blackest province. It has the best climate and most fertile land for growing sugarcane. Castro has it all divided up now, I don’t know why; another cockeyed thing like changing the name of our town, Preston, to “Guatemala”—which makes no sense at all. Back then the entire eastern half of the island was all one province, Oriente. On the map in Daddy’s office, United Fruit’s property was marked in green. Practically the whole map was green—330,000 acres of arable land—with one small area of gray that wasn’t ours marked “owned by others.” People have no idea, the scale of things. Fourteen thousand cane cutters. Eight hundred fifty railcars. Our own machine shops, to repair every part in the mill. Our own airstrip. Two company DC-3s, a Lockheed Lodestar and Daddy’s Cessna Bobcat, which he used for hedgehopping—surveying land or popping over to Banes, the other company mill town thirty miles away. We had our own fleet of sugar boats that went back and forth to Boston. You could sit in the Pan-American Club, which had a bank of panoramic windows perched out over the water like the prow of an ocean liner, and watch the boats coming in and being loaded with bags of raw sugar. During cutting season, our mill processed fifteen million pounds of sugar a day.
this image really sticks with me
The cane cutters were always paid their wages at the end of the season. Before the terrible thing that happened to him, Mr. Flamm, the paymaster, calculated their earnings in a giant ledger book. The workers lined up along the road, and Mr. Flamm unzipped a green leather moneybag and doled out pesos. The moneybag had a big lock on it at the end of the zipper, and the company logo embossed on the front. As each worker received his pay, Mr. Flamm crossed him off the list. He had the workers sign next to their names that they’d received their earnings in full. These guys were mostly from Jamaica. They spoke the king’s English, but practically none of them could sign their name. They were supposed to just put a check next to it instead. Some of them didn’t have last names, just nicknames. Hatch Allain stood by to make sure there was no monkey business. It was all handled in cash. They were paid straight cash, minus whatever they’d charged at the company store, the almacén. If they’d drawn off their pay, it was recorded in the ledger book. The company let them draw off their wages so they could eat before payday. None of them owned cars or mules, and they had to do their shopping in Preston. For a while, the company paid them at the end of each workday, but Daddy said it was better to hold off and pay them at the end of the season. The reason was that some of those guys who came over from Jamaica to cut the cane found out they didn’t like it so much. They deserted, never paid the company for their boat passage from Kingston. Cutting cane is brutal, brutal work, some of the hardest work in the world. Bending over all day long under broiling sun, hitting the cane with a flat-blade machete. Leaves so sharp they’ll slice you to ribbons. People get sunstroke; there were heart attacks in our fields. They have to work fast because the sugar starts to turn. The acid content rises and it ferments if the cane sits for more than a few hours. The workers cut the cane and stripped it of leaves. Tied it into bundles and loaded the bundles onto oxcarts, and from oxcarts onto cane cars, which were shunted straight into the mill for processing. It was an eighteen-hour workday, with maybe four hours of sleep. Those guys were up before dawn, and after dark they worked by the light of oil pots. If you pay people at the very end of cutting season, they stick around and finish the job.
kushner does such a good job of describing these monstrosities in the matter-of-fact tone of someone who was raised with it as a kid (and benefited from it) and thus isn't really capable of seeing it for what it is
Months before the fire started, Daddy had begun to suspect that some of the cane cutters were rebel sympathizers. He had Rev. Crim reporting on the workers. And you might call it racist, especially nowadays, but it was reasonable to assume that anybody black—whether they were Cuban, Haitian, Jamaican—was trouble. Two months before the fire was set, one of the cane cutters had gone into Mr. Flamm’s office to see him. He wanted chits so he could draw off his pay and get credit at the almacén. But he’d already overdrawn what he would make for the whole cutting season. Some of these guys were foolish about that. They’d get chits to buy appliances at the company store and turn around and sell them in Mayarí for a quarter of what they were worth, just to have the money. Spend it on rotgut or lottery tickets. By the time payday rolled around they had nothing coming. They were working like dogs for no pay, just to get out of debt with the company. This cane cutter and Mr. Flamm had an argument. Mr. Flamm wouldn’t give him any store credit and tried to show him the books and explain why, but the guy wasn’t having any of it. What a shame. There is no reason to bring a machete into company headquarters. Mr. Flamm was a little teeny man in his wire-framed glasses. If only somebody had stopped the guy before he went in carrying that machete. After that, Hatch said no blacks in the offices. Mr. Flamm bled to death right there in the accounting office. That’s not politics, it’s mental illness. There were lots of cane cutters, thousands of them, and as I said, they barely had names. They came over on boats from Kingston and lived in these hovels. The one who killed Mr. Flamm ran off. I don’t know if they ever caught him.
"they barely had names" so good