Sugar and Railroads: A Cuban History, 1837-1959

Book Description

Though Cuba was among the first countries in the world to utilize rail transport, the history of its railroads has been little studied. This English translation of the prize-winning Caminos para el azúcar traces the story of railroads in Cuba from their introduction in the nineteenth century through the 1959 Revolution.

More broadly, the book uses the development of the Cuban rail transport system to provide a fascinating perspective on Cuban history, particularly the story of its predominant agro-industry, sugar. While railroads facilitated the sugar industry's rapid growth after 1837, the authors argue, sugar interests determined where railroads would be built and who would benefit from them. Zanetti and Garc'a explore the implications of this symbiotic relationship for the technological development of the railroads, the economic evolution of Cuba, and the lives of the railroad workers.

As this work shows, the economic benefits that accompanied the rise of railroads in Europe and the United States were not repeated in Cuba. Sugar and Railroads provides a poignant demonstration of the fact that technological progress alone is far from sufficient for development.

Customer Reviews:

Should be read as one eats Fuji fish with due respect to the poison.......2007-03-06

Zanetti Lecuona, Oscar and Alejandro Garcia Alvarez 1998 Sugar & railroads: a Cuban history, 1837-1959. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, (translated by Franklin W, Knight and Mary Todd from Caminos para el azucar 1987 Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana) ISBN-10 0807823856 ISBN-13 978-0807823859.

This is an interesting book with much useful information on Cuban railroads and Cuba in general. However, it should only be read as one eats Fuji fish with due respect to the poison. This work is a product of an official Cuban government press and thus infused with communist propaganda and factual distortion. For instance the discussion of Horatio S. Rubens completely omits reference to the work Rubens did for Cuban Independence as lawyer for the Mambi Independence fighters (see Liberty: The Story of Cuba (Hardcover) by Horatio S. Rubens ISBN-10 0404006337; ISBN-13: 978-0404006334). In this Zanetti and Garcia volume the section on Cuban president and then dictator Gerardo Machado (pp. 309-337 and others) much emphasis is given to labor conflict, and yet on p. 337 the tolerance of Machado for the Cuban Communist Party (Stalinist) is strikingly out of context, and the collaboration of this party with the increasingly dictatorial Machado is finessed e.g. p. 321 "With Varona murdered and the Hermandad handed over to traitorous yellow leaders, the railroad proletariat was helpless against the Machado dictatorship" (page numbers are taken from the hard cover edition). And then there is the almost comical ideology of the statement on page 306 "Since the victorious October (Soviet) Revolution had sown panic among the exploiters..." Still the book is useful to track down details of Cuban history such as the map on page 230 which emphasizes the importance of the (Victoria de las) Tunas station in the 1917 Chambelona War (e.g. The New York Times. March 8, 1917, Thursday p 1. "Pablo Menocal, brother of the President and commander of the militia forces in Oriente Province, telegraphed today that General (Calixto Garcia-Iñiguez) Enamorado, hearing that a band of rebels were burning the cars at Dominguez Station, attacked, killing eighteen, including their chief, Capitan José Pantoja."). Thus until, as a historian friend points out, the Cuban files are again open to general inspection one cannot expect objective histories from inside the island. Therefore when one seeks information on the highly developed Cuban railroad system, one must by present necessity refer with great caution to this very flawed book.

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A Classic

Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar
Fernando Ortiz
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture
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Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (Pitt Latin American Studies)
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Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898

ASIN: 0822316161

Book Description

First published in 1940 and long out of print, Fernando Ortiz’s classic work, Cuban Counterpoint is recognized as one of the most important books of Latin American and Caribbean intellectual history. Ortiz’s examination of the impact of sugar and tobacco on Cuban society is unquestionably the cornerstone of Cuban studies and a key source for work on Caribbean culture generally. Though written over fifty years ago, Ortiz’s study of the formation of a national culture in this region has significant implications for contemporary postcolonial studies.
Ortiz presents his understanding of Cuban history in two complementary sections written in contrasting styles: a playful allegorical tale narrated as a counterpoint between tobacco and sugar and a historical analysis of their development as the central agricultural products of the Cuban economy. Treating tobacco and sugar both as agricultural commodities and as social characters in a historical process, he examines changes in their roles as the result of transculturation. His work shows how transculturation, a critical category Ortiz developed to grasp the complex transformation of cultures brought together in the crucible of colonial and imperial histories, can be used to illuminate not only the history of Cuba, but, more generally, that of America as well.
This new edition includes an introductory essay by Fernando Coronil that provides a contrapuntal reading of the relationship between Ortiz’s book and its original introduction by the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Arguing for a distinction between theory production and canon formation, Coronil demonstrates the value of Ortiz’s book for anthropology as well as Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, and shows Ortiz to be newly relevant to contemporary debates about modernity, postmodernism, and postcoloniality.

Customer Reviews:

A Classic.......2001-06-28

This book has become a classic for all of us who study Cuba's history and society. However, I must also recommend the book for any student of social and cultural anthropology interested in cross cultural interactions and acculturation ("transculturación" in Ortiz's own words. It is incredible that his ideas on this subject have been mostly ignored by the United States anthropological community, despite the strong support Ortiz received from Bronislaw Malinowsky. I highly recommend it.

Sugar Baron: Manuel Rionda and the Fortunes of Pre-Castro Cuba

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Sugar Baron: Manuel Rionda and the Fortunes of Pre-Castro Cuba
Muriel McAvoy
Manufacturer: University Press of Florida
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Sugar Baron is the story of Manuel Rionda (1854-1943), who immigrated from Spain to Cuba as a boy of 16 to become a dominant operator in the international sugar trade and to stand at the crossroads of U.S.-Cuban economic relations. Through an examination of Rionda's career as founder of the Cuba Cane Sugar Corporation and of New York's major sugar brokerage firm, Muriel McAvoy gives us an in-depth history of Cuba's sugar industry and its economy during the first half of the 20th century.

McAvoy examines the dilemmas of development and the constraints of financial dependency, probing the inside story of how both Wall Street's and Cuba's political elite viewed the crucial economic problems facing the island and how they attempted to solve them. In great detail, she elucidates conflicts among the various economic sectors in both Cuba and the United States, providing unique and often corrective insights.

Book Description

The idea that sugar, plantations, slavery, and capitalism were all present at the birth of the Atlantic world has long dominated scholarly thinking. In nine original essays by a multinational group of top scholars, Tropical Babylons re-evaluates this so-called "sugar revolution." The most comprehensive comparative study to date of early Atlantic sugar economies, this collection presents a revisionist examination of the origins of society and economy in the Atlantic world.

Focusing on areas colonized by Spain and Portugal (before the emergence of the Caribbean sugar colonies of England, France, and Holland), these essays show that despite reliance on common knowledge and technology, there were considerable variations in the way sugar was produced. With studies of Iberia, Madeira and the Canary Islands, Hispaniola, Cuba, Brazil, and Barbados, this volume demonstrates the similarities and differences between the plantation colonies, questions the very idea of a sugar revolution, and shows how the specific conditions in each colony influenced the way sugar was produced and the impact of that crop on the formation of "tropical Babylons"--multiracial societies of great oppression.

Customer Reviews:

The prehistory of Anglo history in the New World.......2006-11-10

Sugar is grown in more than 100 countries today, and its history is, in some sense, the history of the expansion toward globalism. It took thousands of years to migrate from (probably) New Guinea to India, hundreds to then reach the Mediterranean, only scores to traverse the Atlantic, first hopping to the islands of Madeira and the Canaries, then, on to the Caribbean and the Mainland.

For readers in the United States, sugar shows up in the late 17th century or even later. England's richest American colony, Barbados, was not settled until 1630, did not start producing sugar for a generation after that. Barbadians later moved to South Carolina, bringing ideas of slavery and agriculture that influenced American history profoundly.

However, sugar had been in the New World (if you count the previously unknown islands like Madeira) for two centuries before English-speaking people became intimately concerned. The history of those two centuries is Spanish, Portuguese and African, and most of the essayists in 'Tropical Babylon' are in the Latin tradition.

The Barbadians learned about sugar from the Portuguese or perhaps the Dutch, who seized Portugal's sugar plantations in Brazil for a while. As the essayists show here, there were several sugar traditions for the English (and roughly simultaneously the French) to learn from.

The approach of 'Tropical Babylons' is primarily economic, but there is a great deal of social and even some architectural history here.

These essays are pitched to scholars and students, and fairly specialized ones at that, yet the story of sugar is rewarding in itself, so much so that a reader who 'likes history' will find a lot of miscellaneous facts, perhaps an 'ah ha!' moment or two that illuminates his understanding of better known (to readers of early American) history.

Cuba's Sugar Industry (Contemporary Cuba)

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Cuba's Sugar Industry (Contemporary Cuba)
Jose Alvarez , Lazaro Pena Castellanos , José Alvarez , and Lázaro Peña Castellanos
Manufacturer: University Press of Florida
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Following forty years of tension between Cuba and the United States, this study of Cuba's agroindustry presents the results of a remarkable collaboration between researchers living in the two countries. The authors consider the prospects for the sugar industry--offering scenarios of a smaller, more efficient role in the economy--and examine reforms of the early 1990s.

American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934

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American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934
C?sar J. Ayala
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba
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ASIN: 0807847887
Release Date: 1999-11-10

Book Description

Engaging conventional arguments that the persistence of plantations is the cause of economic underdevelopment in the Caribbean, this book focuses on the discontinuities in the development of plantation economies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century. CŽsar Ayala analyzes and compares the explosive growth of sugar production in the three nations following the War of 1898—when the U.S. acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico—to show how closely the development of the Spanish Caribbean's modern economic and social class systems is linked to the history of the U.S. sugar industry during its greatest period of expansion and consolidation.

Ayala examines patterns of investment and principal groups of investors, interactions between U.S. capitalists and native planters, contrasts between new and old regions of sugar monoculture, the historical formation of the working class on sugar plantations, and patterns of labor migration. In contrast to most studies of the Spanish Caribbean, which focus on only one country, his account places the history of U.S. colonialism in the region, and the history of plantation agriculture across the region, in comparative perspective.

The Cutter (Pioneers of Modern Us Hispanic Literature)
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A Great Book for Gusanos

Yes, yes, yes--a winner! ! !

The Cutter (Pioneers of Modern Us Hispanic Literature)
Virgil Suarez
Manufacturer: Arte Publico Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1558852492

Book Description

Having at last finished his "voluntary" years in the Cuban military, Julian Campos is now ordered to volunteer more of his life in the sugar cane fields. Five years before, the authorities had refused to let young Julian leave the island when his parents emigrated to America. His one remaining hope is that if he cooperates fully, he too will at last be granted permission to go. But as abuse of Julian as a so-called "gusano" increases, his desperation grows, and he begins to consider cutting his own reckless path to freedom.

Customer Reviews:

A Great Book for Gusanos.......2000-12-30

This is a perfect book for the "Gusanos" of Miami and elsewhere who want to restore the Batista horrors in Cuba; but, it is genuinely disappointing for anyone who wants to learn about modern Cuba.

The author, born in Cuba in 1962, left when he was eight years old. Such is his expertise. I was in Cuba when Fidel Castro took power, and never heard a kind word about the thugs and murderers the Batista regime inflicted upon Cubans in order to maintain their pampered privilege. The book offers no sympathy or understanding of what life was like under Batista; but, it's filled with the so-called horrors of life in Cuba since then.

Granted, there are Russians who genuinely miss the law, order and good government of Joseph Stalin. So, it's hardly surprising there are Cubans who miss the good ol' days of Batista, when it really meant something to have money, power, position and privilege. This book is little more than a pampered pout about the passing of the old regime; anyone who wants to get a feeling about what it is like to live under tyranny needs only read `One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch."

Most patriotic Cubans who have any sense of the history of their people are grateful for the many accomplishments of the Castro regime. Having achieved a great deal, they want to be free to accomplish much more on their own. Their disillusionment with Castro is not that he made life better for 80 percent of the people; it's that he's terrified of giving people the freedom to make life better for themselves.

The Cuban success in the US is remarkable, and shows what free Cubans can accomplish. But, they did not need to condemn 80 percent of their fellows to poverty and misery to succeed. In Cuba, the tyranny of Batista kept most of the population in poverty and terror; now, the tyranny of Castro keeps the majority of the population from soaring to the heights of their own individual success. Batista produced terror, Castro produces mediocrity. Take your pick as to which is worse.

Suarez shows no signs of understanding the difference. That makes this a great book for Gusanos, but useless for anyone interested in modern Cuba or the difference between tyranny and the freedom to be an individual.

Yes, yes, yes--a winner! ! !.......1999-04-30

Boy, Suarez is a fine writer. I've read four of his books now and each one is a keeper. What a pleasure it is to read the work of a true language craftsman! Bravo!

The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba

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The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba
Manuel Moreno Fraginals
Manufacturer: Monthly Review Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0853453195

Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929

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Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929
Alan Dye
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0804728194

Bitter Cuban Sugar: Monoculture and Economic Dependence from 1825-1899 (South American and Latin American Economic History)

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Bitter Cuban Sugar: Monoculture and Economic Dependence from 1825-1899 (South American and Latin American Economic History)
Felix Goizueta-Mimo
Manufacturer: Taylor & Francis
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Binding: Hardcover

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