BUILDING HISTORY

Caribbean Blacks Built The Panama Canal

By Kristen Jones

In 1904, construction began on the Panama Canal, which was completed in 1914. The brainchild of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who engineered a revolution to create the country of Panama in order to accomplish the feat, it connected the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, saving sailors about 8,000 miles of travel. The canal was intended to reduce the distance, cost and time for ships to transport cargo between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Before its existence, ships would have to go around nearly the entire continent of South America and through the Strait of Magellan in Argentina and Chile.

Black labor was used to complete the daunting task because of the endurance shown by Afro-West Indians in the construction of railroads and other projects in Bocas del Toro, Panama, and Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. According to Panamanian author Francisco Marrero Lobinot, many of the West Indians who arrived in Panama during these years were from the French Antilles of Martinique and

Guadeloupe. Between 1906-1907, Panama received more than 2,800 workers from Martinique and about 2,000 from Guadeloupe. An estimated 50,000 Guadeloupeans and Martinicans participated in the construction of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914. In 2014, it was estimated that there were between 60,000 and 70,000 descendants of these West Indians living in Panama.

Workers on the canal were paid through a segregated gold and silver payroll system, which gave certain workers advantages over other workers. While some Canal Zone officials compared employees on the gold and silver rolls to military officers and enlisted men, the characteristic that determined on which roll an employee was placed was race. With very few exceptions, American and Northern European whites were placed on the superior gold roll and blacks and Southern European whites on the silver roll. Until 1918, when all employees began to be paid in U.S. dollars, gold roll employees received payments in gold coins, in American currency, while their silver roll counterparts received payments in silver coins, initially Colombian pesos. During the canal construction years, silver roll workers were paid with coins from various nations; in several years, American coins were imported due to shortages in local coins.

In its finished form, the canal represented the emergence of America as a world power and cost $375 million to construct. In addition to the economic cost, the human cost for the workers was staggeringly high. According to History.com, “Many people died building the Panama Canal: Of the 56,000 workers employed between 1904 and 1913, roughly 5,600 were reportedly killed.”