In 1913, Cuban president José Miguel Gómez bowed to pressure from sugar companies and their US backers and promulgated an executive degree permitting Caribbean immigrant laborers to enter Cuba on seasonal contracts. Three years earlier, a Haitian named Occiano Guincio had entered a very different type of legally binding agreement on Cuban soil. On August 18, 1910, the Haitian agricultural laborer married Cornelia Videau, an Afro-Cuban native of Guantánamo, in the bride's hometown. At first glance, the marriage between the Haitian and Cuban seems anomalous. It took place before companies were allowed to recruit migrants in a period when statistics show negligible entries for Haitians. In actuality, the union of Guincio and Videau highlights the connections between Haiti and Cuba that predated the migration decree. One of the central arguments of this chapter is that such longstanding flows of goods, people, and ideas – of which Occiano Guincio is a perfect representative – shaped the processes of building the Cuban state, strengthening its border, and legislating the bourgeoning temporary contract migration system.

The family histories of Guincio and Videau accentuate the very different experiences of abolition that occurred in Haiti and Cuba; their marriage also illustrates the inseparability of these processes. Occiano Guincio had been born free in Port Salut, Haiti, in 1882. He could trace his legal status as a free black man to the events of the Haitian Revolution, the uprising that successfully ended slavery on the French colony of Saint Domingue almost ninety years before his birth. In contrast, slavery still existed in Cuba in 1885 when Cornelia Videau was born free into an enslaved family. Her legal status resulted from the 1870 Ley Moret, or free-womb law, which attempted to abolish slavery gradually by giving freedom to children born of Cuban slaves. In contrast to the early, rapid, and violent process of emancipation that occurred in Haiti, Cuban slavery was abolished gradually in the late nineteenth century to avoid a repeat of the Haitian Revolution. At the time of Cornelia's birth, her mother, Rosa Videaux, was identified in documents as a “patrocinada of Vidaud.” Like other Cuban slaves in the late nineteenth century, Rosa was undergoing an experience called patronato, a legal mechanism of gradual emancipation, in which her master maintained control over her labor and mobility.