A Deepening Sense of Otherness

Abstract

The maquinistas were geographically distant from their old homes in an age where international travel was still a complicated process. The Europeans had to travel at least four thousand miles by ship to reach Cuba, a journey that in the mid-nineteenth century could take more than a month, depending on the route taken and the vagaries of the weather. The North Americans were somewhat closer to home, though even for them the trip back to New York and New England, where most came from, took several days, later described by the North American sugar planter Edwin Atkins as “a rough voyage,” suffering “the smell of cooking, bilge water, engine oil and steam from the sugar cargo.”¹ They also suffered an environmental difference and disjuncture. Without exception, the maquinistas came from temperate climates, and the Caribbean tropics would have seemed a very strange place to them. In some ways this may have been a positive experience. As maquinistas, they came from notoriously insalubrious industrial centers.² Compared to the filthy conditions, drab architecture and leaden skies that they were leaving, the brilliant primary colors that greeted them in Cuba would have been a stunning experience, and the wide, open spaces of the sugar plantations would have contrasted sharply with the crowded city streets and factories.