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

by Jean Stubbs, Victor Bulmer-Thomas (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781914278075
Publisher:	Amaurea Press
Publication date:	06/30/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	354
File size:	34 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jean Stubbs first went to Cuba in 1968 to conduct research. She married there, had two children, and lived and worked in Havana until 1987. Now based in London, she has published widely on Cuba, with a specialist interest in tobacco, class, race, gender, nation and migration. Her foundational work on Cuban tobacco, and especially the Havana cigar, led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a regional and global scale, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history.Professor Emerita of London Metropolitan University, she is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of London) and the Institute of the Americas (University College London). In 2009, she was awarded the UNESCO Toussaint Louverture Medal, and in 2012 was elected member of the Cuban Academy of History.
First person in the UK to hold the title of Reader in Economics of Latin America (1988), he became Professor of Economics in 1990, at Queen Mary College, London. From 1992 to 1998, he was the Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies (University of London). In recognition of his work with the Institute, he received honours from the governments of Brazil and Colombia, and was awarded an OBE. In 2001, he became Director of Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), for which he was honoured by the British government with a CMG in 2006. He subsequently became a Visiting Professor at Florida International University, and is now Professor Emeritus of the University of London, Senior Distinguished Fellow of the School of Advanced Studies (University of London), Honorary Professor of the Institute of the Americas (University College London), and Associate Fellow in the United States and Americas Programme at Chatham House.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Victor Bulmer-Thomas

Preface to the new edition

Preface to the original edition

Introdution: A changing world tobacco economy

Part 1: Development and distortion of Cuban tobacco

1. Don Tabaco, 1817-88
2. Enter monopoly capital, 1888-1902
3. Legacy to past prosperity, 1902-24
4. Mechanization and recession, 1925-33
5. New Deal for tobacco, 1934-58
6. The peripheral mode of production

Part 2: Relations of tobacco production

7. The tobacco peasantry and proletariat

8. Labour aristocrats?

Part 3: Tobacco, nation and class

9. Militancy and the growth of the unions

10. Early reformism and anarcho-syndicalism

11. Revolutionary nationalism of the 1900s

12. Cigar makers on the defensive

13. The sleeping lion awakes

14. The big tobacco unions of 1936-48

15. The machine and the anti-union war

Epilogue: A new twist

Appendix:

A. Graphs

B. Statistics

C. Biographies of interviewees

D. Archival documents

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Work on tobacco by Jean Stubbs

About the author