In 1927, Alejo Carpentier sat in a Cuban jail cell writing what would become the now-celebrated author's first novel. His challenge, as he described it later, was to create a text that was politically and aesthetically avant-garde and also highly nationalist. The result was ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!, set in Cuba's modernized, mostly foreign-owned, sugar industry during World War I. For Carpentier, rural Cuba was a place where “life is organized according to [sugar's] will.” One effect of this is the arrival of immigrants of all nationalities, including a “new plague” of “ragged Haitians” or “black mercenaries with straw hats and machetes at their belts.” When not cutting cane, they sequester themselves in their barracones (labor barracks), the “stone constructions, long like a hangar, with iron window panes” that were originally built for slaves to inhabit.

Within this newly created world of foreign capital and foreign workers lived Afro-Cuban communities. Elders shared memories of slavery to younger men like Menegildo Cue, Carpentier's protagonist, who would eventually embrace his Afro-Cuban cultural roots as an antidote to the United States’ political and economic domination. Cue, who drove oxen on the sugar plantation, greeted Haitians and other immigrants with disdain. He “felt strange among so many blacks with other customs and languages. The Jamaicans were ‘snobby’ and animals! The Haitians were animals and savages!” Cue also complained that Cubans “were without work since the braceros from Haiti accepted incredibly low daily wages!”

The heterogeneous group of workers who migrated to eastern Cuba from territories throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia would have certainly recognized the physical, environmental, and economic transformations of the Cuban countryside that Carpentier described. Ironically, these very individuals, who constituted the demographic face of these metamorphoses, would have been less convinced by Carpentier's depiction of the interactions among native and immigrant laborers. Despite his effort to break with intellectual currents of early twentieth-century Cuba and to criticize US imperialism, Carpentier's assertions about laborers are consistent with the logics of both the Cuban nationalist press and sugar company administrators. Like Carpentier, Cuban journalists, sugar company administrators, and even contemporary historians describe Haitians as a homogenous group of sugar cane cutters. For these individuals, Haitians were segregated at the lowest level of sugar labor hierarchies by managers who sought to divide their workforce along national lines and to perpetuate racist scorn from Menegildo Cue's living and breathing counterparts.