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.
Table of Content
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
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
About the author
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.
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