Crass Struggle by Naylor R. T.;

Author:Naylor, R. T.; [Naylor, R.T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SMOKE RING

Botanical considerations aside, tobacco was very different from sugar, the other major Cuban crop. Sugar was grown on great plantations using, until 1880, slave labour, then processed with heavy machinery. Slave revolts were few and viciously suppressed. By contrast, most Cuban tobacco farmers were small holders who used few slaves; and raw tobacco required skilled labour (almost always by free or freed workers) to turn it into a valuable commodity. While sugar had been kept under the imperial thumb, tobacco planters, along with processors, played a leading role in resistance against Spanish taxes and trade controls from as far back as the early eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth, tobacco workers began to form craft associations to fight wage cuts by owners, establishing a tradition of labour militancy that persisted right up to the 1959 Revolution.

Over the nineteenth century, Spain’s economic power in Cuba waned while US influence grew. That shift stamped its imprint on the tobacco business. By the 1830s a small colony of Cuban cigar makers had taken root in Key West, until then just a sand bar surrounded by mangrove, but well located to give manufacturers access to both Cuban leaf and the US market while freeing them of Spanish taxes and growing labour militancy back home. As so often in the future, tax evasion and union-busting explained more about the dynamics of production than any ideological cant about “consumer preferences” found in economics textbooks. Each subsequent time the US raised duties on foreign manufactured goods, its tobacco companies imported more Cuban leaf and fewer cigars, while more Cuban cigar makers shifted location to the US. Meanwhile, back in Cuba, tobacco planters who freed their slaves took a central role in the Ten Years War (1868–78) against Spain. Although Spanish rule survived the uprising, everyone knew the end was nigh. And Cuban revolutionaries began to openly solicit among émigré tobacco workers in Florida financial contributions toward the next struggle.8

During the 1898 revolution, the tobacco sector paid a heavy price, its farms ravaged by curtailment of credit and by imperial reprisals, and its factories drained by recruitment of workers into rebel ranks. When the US took advantage of the struggle to launch the Spanish-American War, gobbling up Cuba along with the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Spain reacted by declaring Cuban tobacco of foreign origin, doubling the tariff level it faced. The US victory permitted emerging US producers to buy up, merge, and shut down Cuban factories, cheered on by Tampa, a city that aspired to replace Havana as the world’s cigar capital. No doubt the cheering stopped very quickly as US giants began to wipe out as well small factories producing their own brands at home, including many Cuban-run operations in Florida. The big operators created a new marketing strategy, focusing on a handful of brand names targeted to price categories rather than taste niches. In remaining factories the division of labour intensified along with the pace of work. That trend accelerated in the 1920s with

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