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.

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