It’s publication week for the new book from Jean Stubbs: Tobacco Counterpoints: Cuba and the Global Habano. An impressive retrospective collection of many of her extensive writings on the local and global history of Cuban tobacco – and in particular of that supreme luxury commodity, the Havana cigar.
Jean first went to Cuba in the 1960s, when the island was still at the height of revolutionary optimism. Arriving initially to carry out research into the labour history of Cuba’s tobacco workers – having herself been mentored by the late great Eric Hobsbawm – so found love and life in Cuba, and ended up living and working in Havana until 1987.
What had begun as research for her PhD, ended up being published in 1985 (Cambridge University Press) as Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860-1958 (a new, expanded edition of which Amaurea published in 2023). This quickly established her as one of the leading specialists on Cuban tobacco history. After returning to London in 1987, she became a lecturer with the Caribbean Studies Centre at the then University of North London (later London Metropolitan University) – where she continued to develop her academic career, eventually becoming professor, and the Centre’s director.
Her foundational work on Cuban tobacco and the Havana cigar led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a regional and global scale – linking commodity and migration histories, and drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history.
This is seen in this collection of 19 of her previously published articles. These have been divided into three broad sections. In Part One, her earlier work explores class, race, gender and nation. In Part Two, she moves on to focus more on the relationship between tobacco, nation and migration. In Part Three, her more recent work has followed the logic of this research into transnational analyses, as she has followed Cuban tobacco, the Havana cigar, and the associated tobacco workers around the world. What began as a very Cuban story, ends up encompassing much of the Caribbean, the United States, Canary Islands, and as far afield as Indonesia.
Jean has always had a close, yet critical, relationship with the writings of Fernando Ortiz, and his notion of the ‘counterpoint’. She takes this concept, and sees it running in various ways through Cuban tobacco history. As she writes in her Preface: “The counterpoints are not only of tobacco with sugar but within tobacco itself, in Cuba and abroad, as the Havana leaf and the craft of hand-rolling El Habano, against all the odds, established and defended itself to become the yardstick by which to judge a good cigar, sought after, imitated and counterfeited the world over.”
Now retired, Jean’s research and writing has brought her significant recognition over the years. She has been chair of both the UK’s Society for Caribbean Studies and the regional Caribbean Studies Association. In 2009, she was awarded the UNESCO Toussaint Louverture Medal for combatting racism in political, literary and artistic fields; and in 2012 was elected as a member of the Cuban Academy of History. In addition to her work on tobacco, her research into contemporary Cuban migration built on this to explore how commodities and nation-branding have shaped new Cuban diasporic mobilities; and her involvement in the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project (of which she was a founding director) led to her interest in commodity frontiers and environmental history, and co-producing the documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (dir. Michael Chanan, 2019). She also recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Commodity History and the forthcoming Palgrave volume, Tobacco in Global Perspective.
Tobacco Counterpoints is available from on-line and all good booksellers. We have brought it out in three editions: hardback, paperback, and soon to be released eBook.
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