Seasonal labor migration from Haiti to Cuba sits at the center of how the early twentieth-century Caribbean is narrated, in questions of race, of national development, and of United States imperial power. Casey reconstructs what that migration was actually like for the workers who undertook it.

Following them between rural and urban Haiti and the sugar plantations, coffee farms, and cities of eastern Cuba, the study fills a substantial gap and offers a close view of how empire, labor, and political economy operated day to day in both countries.

Migrants were not simply moved around by these forces. Their attempts to improve the conditions in which they lived and worked, and to keep practicing their religions, left marks on migration policy, on economic life, on how race was understood, and on Caribbean spiritual practice, in a period when Haiti and Cuba were each living under United States domination.