Bread, or Bullets!: Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898 (review)

Given the valorization of class struggle in the master narrative of Cuban history during the last forty years, historians of the island have remained oddly understated about the politics of the urban working class in the nineteenth century. In the rural context, a justifiable preoccupation with slavery and the transition to free labor, especially in sugar production, has revealed an intricate relationship between workers and the independence movement. It is clear after reading Bread, or Bullets! that similar loyalties existed in the cities. Joan Casanovas places Cuba's emergent labor movement against the backdrop of Spain's efforts to control its last colonies in the Americas. As the class experiences of urban workers achieved institutional and political forms, calls for change routinely clashed with an unyielding colonial government.

Casanovas sets his sights on the tobacco manufacturing sector in Cuba's western provinces, the most dynamic area of the urban economy. Social hierarchies divided workers, slave and free alike, by sex, race, place of origin, and skill, but not intractably so. Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, racially segregated mutual-aid societies for artisans coexisted alongside more inclusive organizations, educational endeavors, and periodic strikes. After the crippling Ten Years' War (1868-1878), a weakened labor movement rebuilt itself under the protection of political reforms that relaxed restrictions on press and association. Unions, periodicals, and cultural centers proliferated as workers began to question the potential for effective colonial reform. Casanovas suggests that, in this environment, collectivist anarchism began to hold greater appeal. Successful anarchist-led strikes in Havana and Key West in the late 1880s solidified the confrontational stance of the labor movement and prompted the government to begin a repressive campaign against the major unions and other labor associations on the island.

Bread, or Bullets!--a title borrowed from an incendiary essay by working-class anarchist intellectual Enrique Roig--deftly shows how tobacco workers organized and how the labor movement they led championed a social transformation that dovetailed with the cause of Cuban independence. Casanovas draws on an extraordinary range of sources, and he navigates with ease the political currents of a dizzying number of periodicals. In doing so, he illustrates a transnational dimension of the early Cuban labor movement: Spanish anarchist periodicals, which lectores often read aloud in tobacco factories, accelerated the move away from reformism in the 1880s. The book's close association between these publications and their audiences occasionally elides the distinction between institutions and workers themselves, to the extent that pro-Spanish sentiment or even recoiling from politics altogether are absent as alternative strategies to separatism and union membership. But, in this sense, it underscores the limited space in which individuals could strike any political pose in late colonial Cuba.

The final chapter of the book identifies the crisis in the tobacco industry and the impediments to reform in the late 1880s and early 1890s as the turning point when labor organizations increasingly identified with the left wing of the independence movement. This shift took place on two fronts: the repression of unions and the anarchist-led movement on the island itself, and the migration of Cuban workers to Key West, Tampa, and New York, where the Partido Revolucionario Cubano was gaining popularity within expatriate communities. Notably, however, labor representatives at the 1892 Labor Congress in Havana declined to respond definitively to government crackdowns, instead maintaining their distance from political parties and leaving individual workers free to align with the separatist movement. The argument that workers might have made this decision based on their understanding of class politics is a compelling one. Casanovas has given urban laborers their due in the history of struggle against colonialism--and against the inequalities that reinforced it. Bread, or Bullets! furnishes Cuban historians with fresh terms and...