Cuban labour resources

Christine Coates looks at resources for studying Cuban labour history in the TUC Library Collections

The TUC Library Collections, established in 1922, transferred to the London Metropolitan University in 1996. Their large holdings of material relating to the economic, political and labour movement history of the Caribbean area were developed to support the work of the TUC Colonial Advisory Committee. A source note on our Colonial/Commonwealth collections is on our website at /library/w33181_3.pdf. Consequently, coverage of non-Commonwealth nations, including Cuba, is comparatively weak. In fact, the earliest item in the collection is an 1924 official complaint re the ill-treatment of British West Indian labourers in Cuba. Apart from a small collection of miscellaneous books and pamphlets, which includes books such as Our Cuban Colony by Leland Jenks, printed speeches by Fidel Castro and publications from various British political groups such as the Fabian Society or Union of Democratic Control, most of the material held here relates to the Cuban labour movement.

Our holdings of Cuban trade union literature start c1940 with various pamphlets and reports from the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC). There is a good run of Trabajadores from 1971-1996 and of the CTC's Boletin Internacional, but the only pre-1959 union bulletin held is Unidad Gastronomica. Runs of other periodicals are incomplete as they were dependant on ad hoc exchange agreements or copies brought back by visitors. For example, we have a single year (1964) of Trabajo from the Cuban Ministry of Labour. We also hold a run of Cuban Labor, issued by the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Labor Front from Miami, and similar material from other émigré groups.

Information on the history of the Cuban labour movement can also be gleaned from the publications of various international organisations such as the International Labour Organisation and its regional organisations and the trade union internationals (IFTU, ICFTU, WFTU) and their trade secretariats. Cuban delegates attended the ILO Plantations Committee and the 1953 meeting was held in Havana. Cuba was in fact one of the nine founding members of the ILO in 1919. We have four boxes of pamphlets on the sugar industry and these contain many reports by organisations such as the international unions for plantation workers and food workers on conditions in the Cuban sugar cane industries. Also held are publications from pan-Latin American organisations such as the Confederacion de Trabajadores de America Latina, to which the CTC was affiliated in the 1940s.

US foreign policy towards Cuba can be seen not only in official and USIS publications, for example Labor News in Latin America, but also through the lens of material produced by US unions and organisations such as the American Institute for Free Labor Development. In early 1959, the AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News welcomed "the wave of democratic resurgence" which overthrew Batista but soon US unions adopted a more critical line and by 1962 were pledging wholehearted support for US government policy (for example see AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News March 1963.)

British trade union attitudes to Cuba can be traced through conference resolutions and periodical articles held here. References to Cuba in the TUC reports from 1919-1968 can be found by entering CUBA in the search box at http://www.unionhistory.info/ and there are a handful of references in TUC publications. The TUC internal files, including their correspondence with the CTC, have been deposited at the Modern Records Centre http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/.

Christine Coates is Librarian of the TUC Collections.

Notes

The TUC Library Collections are at London Metropolitan University, Holloway Road Learning Centre, 236 Holloway Road, London N7 6PP. Tel: 020 7133 2260 // Email: tuclib@londonmet.ac.uk

TUC Collections web page: www.londonmet.ac.uk/libraries/tuc

The Union Makes Us Strong: TUC History Online can be accessed at www.unionhistory.info

Copyright

Copyright for this work is held jointly between Christine Coates and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

IJCS Volume 2 Issue 1 June 2009