Tobacco on the Periphery

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, adding other source material, with a new Preface and a Foreword by Victor Bulmer-Thomas.

A collection of Jean’s writings on Cuban tobacco, Tobacco Counterpoint: Cuba and the Global Habano, will be published by Amaurea Press in October 2024.

Jean Stubbs

Jean Stubbs first went to Cuba in 1968 to conduct research for her PhD (University of London, 1975). She married there, had two children, and lived and worked in Havana until 1987. On her return to London, she was drawn into Caribbean and Latin American Studies, and served as chair of both the UK 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 a member of the Cuban Academy of History.

She has published widely on Cuba, with a special 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, linking commodity and migration histories, drawing on sociological, anthropological and agronomic approaches, as well as archival and oral history. Her work on contemporary Cuban migration built on this to explore how commodities and nation-branding have shaped new Cuban diasporic mobilities; and her interest in commodity frontiers and environmental history led her to co-produce the documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (2019).