Synopses & Reviews
Sugar was Cuba's principal export from the late eighteenth century throughout much of the twentieth, and the majority of the population depended on sugar production for its livelihood. By analyzing the experiences of participants in Cuban sugar communities, from cane farmers to wealthy sugar mill managers, Gillian McGillivray illuminates how sugar communities were instrumental in the formation and transformation of the Cuban republic during a crucial ninety-year period between 1868 and 1959, as Cuba shifted from colonialism to patronage, and from populist rule to the revolutions of 1933 and 1959. Gillian McGillivray's accessible study also shows that Cuban history fits larger twentieth-century patterns of the western hemisphere, from modernity to popular nationalism to Cold War repression.
Drawing on provincial and company archives in Cuba and the United States, McGillivray charts the course of Cuba on both a local and a national level, revealing in the process how the two intersect and reinforce one another. She focuses on two sugar communities--Chaparra, located in eastern Cuba, and Tuinucu, located in the central province of Sancti Spiritus--to examine how individuals built and sustained sugar communities, and how their actions altered the political, social, and economic structures of Cuba over time. Cane burning, at the hands of cane farmers, workers, and revolutionaries at various points in Cuban history, became a powerful way to commit sabotage, take control of the harvest season, improve working conditions, protest political repression, attack colonialism and imperialism, nationalize sugarmills, and ultimately acquire greater access to political and economic power on the island. Layering local Cuban experiences within global phenomena and international political trends, Blazing Cane reveals that much can be learned about Cuba's revolutionary and republican periods through a look at worker and farmer mobilization.
Review
andldquo;Gillian McGillivray offers a new and original understanding of the history of Cuba from the mid-nineteenth century to the Cuban revolution by reading it from the perspective of two sugar communities. She stresses the agency of workers in sugar communities, who asserted demands and engaged with, as they helped shape, the rhetoric of the state and state formation. Blazing Cane is an important contribution to modern Cuban history, and a compelling case for the impossibility of separating the local from the national and transnational in any study.andrdquo;andmdash;William French, author of A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico
Review
andldquo;We know very little about the lives of sugar workers and their interactions with the managerial personnel of the mills in which they worked. McGillivray goes deep into documentary archives to address this vital shortcoming of the historiography of Cuba, to look at Cuban society and politics through two sugar communities. Blazing Cane gives an insightful look at how ordinary people coped with the complex and uncertain circumstances that surrounded them in the Cuban republic.andrdquo;andmdash;Alejandro de la Fuente, author of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba
Review
andldquo;Lucidly written, sophisticated, marvelously nuanced, and meticulously researched. . . . This is simply superb history. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;McGillivrayandrsquo;s research has been terrific. . . . She has wisely combined archival documents, a considerable number of newspaper articles, and interviews, broadening her analysis and cementing her conclusions. Overall, Blazing Cane constitutes a courageous take on this aspect of the history of twentieth-century Cuba. . .andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;McGillivrayandrsquo;s insistence on embedding the history of the two sugar communities within the broad sweep of Cubaandrsquo;s historical development makes this book especially attractive to teachers as well as researchers. Indeed, Blazing Cane could profitably be used as the core text for courses dealing with Cuban history in the one hundred years preceding the 1959 Revolution, and as a model for how to study the interactions between local, regional, national, and transnational forces.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;
Blazing Cane is in the finest tradition of Cuban rural history, while at the same time clearing a new interpretative path. . . .
Blazing Cane is well suited for a general audience. The section on the Chaparra sugar mill includes 14 photographs from the mill archives, which are of such high quality that one can almost taste the sugar being processed.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;With Blazing Cane, McGillivray has given Cubanists andmdash; and Latin Americanists in general andmdash; a treat: a book both accessible to undergraduates and meaty enough for a graduate class, one that offers convincing answers to many questions and at the same time suggests new avenues of research. In so doing, Blazing Cane provides a fresh vision of Cuba in the twentieth century, tying the nation into larger regional trends rather than separating it from them. In the end, like the cane fires that flare up throughout the book to signal moments of change, Blazing Cane may itself be a marker, lighting a new path in the study of Cuban history.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;This book offers a new understanding of Cubaandrsquo;s sugar politics. It will prove essential to anyone interested in pre-1959 Cuban history or in the relationship of the middle class to state formation in Latin America.andrdquo;
Synopsis
Sugar was Cubaandrsquo;s principal export from the late eighteenth century throughout much of the twentieth, and during that time, the majority of the islandandrsquo;s population depended on sugar production for its livelihood. In
Blazing Cane, Gillian McGillivray examines the development of social classes linked to sugar production, and their contribution to the formation and transformation of the state, from the first Cuban Revolution for Independence in 1868 through the Cuban Revolution of 1959. She describes how cane burning became a powerful way for farmers, workers, and revolutionaries to commit sabotage, take control of the harvest season, improve working conditions, protest political repression, attack colonialism and imperialism, nationalize sugarmills, and, ultimately, acquire greater political and economic power.
Focusing on sugar communities in eastern and central Cuba, McGillivray recounts how farmers and workers pushed the Cuban government to move from exclusive to inclusive politics and back again. The revolutionary caudillo networks that formed between 1895 and 1898, the farmer alliances that coalesced in the 1920s, and the working-class groups of the 1930s affected both day-to-day local politics and larger state-building efforts. Not limiting her analysis to the island, McGillivray shows that twentieth-century Cuban history reflected broader trends in the Western Hemisphere, from modernity to popular nationalism to Cold War repression.
Synopsis
Offers a new understanding of the history of Cuba from the mid-nineteenth century to the Cuban revolution by showing the national and transnational implications of local developments in two sugar mill communities.
About the Author
Gillian McGillivray is Associate Professor of History at Glendon College, York University.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
Chronology of Major Political Events xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Colonial Compact, 1500andndash;1895 13
2. Revolutionary Destruction of the Colonial Compact, 1895andndash;98 37
3. U.S. Power and Cuban Middlemen, 1898andndash;1917 63
4. The Patrons' Compact: andquot;Peace,andquot; andquot;Progresss,andquot; and General Menocal, 1899andndash;1919 86
5. Patrons, Matrons, and Resistance, 1899andndash;1959 118
6. From Patronage to Populism and Back Again, 1919andndash;26 145
7. Revolutionary Rejection of the Patrons' Compact, 1926andndash;33 188
8. The Populist Compact, 1934andndash;59 226
Conclusion 272
Appendix. Selections from the 1946 Chaparra and Delicias Collective Contract 279
Notes 287
Glossary 345
Bibliography 349
Index 367