Technological innovation was central to nineteenth-century Cuba’s lead in world sugar manufacture. Along with steam-powered machinery came migrant engineers, indispensable aliens who were well rewarded for their efforts.

These migrant engineers remained perennial outsiders, symbolic of Cuba's growing economic dependency, privileged scapegoats unconsciously caught up in the island's political insecurities. This book tells the story of a group of forgotten migrant workers who anonymously contributed to Cuba's development and whose experience helps illuminate both the advance of the Cuban sugar industry and the processes by which the island was bound into global commodity-driven networks of control, dependency, and resistance.

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