Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860-1958

This is the story of Cuban tobacco, whose agricultural and industrial development was fashioned as deftly as a Havana cigar around overseas trading interests. It traces the nineteenth-century growth of a strong tobacco oligarchy, peasant grower class and urban salaried work force, alongside slave and indentured labour, and examines how a prestigious manufacturing country was transformed into an exporter of leaf. Visibly poor peasant agriculture concealed foreign and home capital which, while creating some large plantations, used and even propagated a most extreme form of sharecropping. Well into the twentieth century, an increasingly embattled industry catered to dwindling luxury markets and an unstable, fluctuating home market with but a few relatively large, on the whole family, concerns and a proliferation of small sweatshop and outwork production.Jean Stubbs penetrates the finer socio-political aspects of the radically changing nature and composition of peasantry and proletariat, including the interlacing of race, gender and skill, to take a closer look at areas of class action and national and class consciousness, be it through reformism, anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary nationalism, socialism or communism.This new edition expands on the 1985 original with a new Foreword and Preface, and other source material."A most welcome contribution to the scholarship on Cuba, going a long way toward closing one of the more conspicuous gaps in the literature, and providing a model of careful research and judicious scholarship. The book will serve as a standard reference work on the subject for years to come." Louis A. Pérez, Jr."This excellent book, from the pen of the premier tobacco historian of the Caribbean, documents thoroughly the changing character of the labor process, gender relations, trade unions, and the concentration of landed and industrial ownership within the trade." Juan José Baldrich"'Tobacco on the Periphery' marshals a profusion of sources for a profound analysis of a period that was fundamental for the history of this commodity in Cuba: that of the regularization of the cultivation of the leaf, the development of its manufacture and the financing of the prestige and the commercial value of the Havana cigar on the world stage." Oscar Zanetti"A well-timed reprint of a masterful and highly readable historical account, surpassing all published academic histories on tobacco in Cuba. In her humorous and sometimes caustic style, Jean Stubbs shows that tobacco, particularly the Havana cigar, was and is of great socio-economic, cultural and political consequence within and outside Cuba." Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff"This book continues to be a classic - a point of reference and a stimulus for continuing to delve deeper into these themes. Her main arguments take us beyond Cuba, establishing a transnational perspective in contemporary tobacco studies." Vicent Sanz Rozalén"Provides readers with an intersectional understanding of the politics of tobacco peasantries and proletarians and the different forms of unionism through the years in dealing with the changing role of the state and capital within global market transformations." Ratna Saptari"Offers a Thompsonian perspective, in which the material production of tobacco leaf, and its manufacture in the urban centres, including the working conditions and working-class struggles, are the basis for the argument, reaching into the post-1959 period. The book is rigorous and current. Obligatory reading for understanding the history of tobacco manufacture and the struggles of the Cuban tobacco workers." Joan Casanovas"This book is a gem in the historiography on the Cuban tobacco industry, indicative of our national identity, for its well-documented and profound analysis of the information that it brings together." Zoe Nocedo Primo Read more