ABSTRACT

The effects of the Great Depression reverberated across the globe. The depression in agriculture began in the early 1920s in much of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Emotional depression, especially among older skilled workingmen who could not find work, became pronounced. Compounding the effects of the Depression, the disaster that became known as the Dust Bowl devastated the American plains. All of the capitalist governments attempted to introduce measures designed to cope with the economic disasters of the 1930s. The economic collapse of markets, production, wages, and employment first disrupted and then reversed decades-long patterns of migration in regions across the globe. For decades prior to the onset of the Great Depression many people in the Caribbean had participated in a dynamic circuit of migration that brought them to work in such countries as Panama, Venezuela, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and the United States.