Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959 (review)

As Gillian McGillivray points out in her study of late colonial and Republican-era Cuba, a comrade-in-arms of Fidel Castro once wrote, “Revolution in Cuba means burning sugarcane—it did in 1868, 1895, and 1930–33, and it did for us” (p. 264). Indeed, from colonial times through the 1959 Revolution, setting cane alight was often a profoundly revolutionary act designed to help overthrow a political and social order dependent on a single product. Similarly, in a number of short-lived rebellions following Cuban independence, insurgents used the mere threat of cane burning to demand a share of the island’s sugar wealth. But cane fire could also be a practical measure used in more subtle negotiations; because burnt cane loses its sugar content if not ground immediately, workers occasionally torched sugar fields in order to ensure employment and cane farmers did so to guarantee that local mills purchase their product. This full range of sugar’s economic, political, and social significance for the Cuban nation is the foundation of McGillivray’s expertly researched Blazing Cane.

Although scholars often take for granted Cuba’s dependency on sugar, none has so aptly centered sugar production, mill towns, and the social classes associated with cane cultivation in the history of Cuban state formation from colonial times through the 1959 Revolution. Anchored in two sugarmill communities, the Tuinucú mill in the central province of Santa Clara owned and run by the Rionda family and the massive Chaparra and Delicias mills in northern Oriente owned by the Cuban American Sugar Company (Cubanaco), Blazing Cane shifts seam-lessly between local, regional, and national scopes. In an analysis rooted in this wide breadth of perspective and exhaustive archival investigation, McGillivray demonstrates that cane farmers (colonos) and sugar workers helped push the Cuban state through a series of increasingly inclusive social compacts, from colonialism (lasting until 1895) to rule based on patronage (1899–1933) and finally to populism (1933–1959).

In her first two chapters, McGillivray details the familiar “colonial compact,” in which western planters accepted Spanish rule in exchange for Spain’s promise to protect slave-based sugar production, and that compact’s revolutionary destruction. Although renegotiated during Cuba’s first two independence wars, it was when the agreement’s terms were annihilated—slavery was over and Spain could no longer protect sugar—that tides turned in nationalists’ favor. An excellent third chapter details how, despite Cuba’s “extreme level of revolutionary mobilization” during thirty years of independence struggle, U.S. military authorities and investors, upon intervention, managed to squeeze Cubans out of their national resources, limit Cuban sovereignty, reverse the revolution’s goals, and push Cuban elites into the role of “middleman” to foreign capital (p. 64).

In her innovative approach to Cuban history, McGillivray extends this social-contract analysis through Cuba’s Republican years. Her fourth and fifth chapters cover the “patrons’ compact,” arguing that early twentieth-century American capitalists and veteran Cuban generals, or caudillos, maintained social order and profited tremendously by bringing “progress” and “modernity” to mill communities. Although not entirely without resistance, workers in company towns accepted a high degree of social control in exchange for modern benefits like sanitation services, schools, and hospitals. Matrons, in particular, distributed favors and the Rionda women, who took charge of charity work at Tuinucú, were formally recognized for part in bringing about peaceful “social relations” (p. 133).

McGillivray does not claim that shifts between compacts were tidy; rather, she deftly points readers to moments of rupture, highlighting Cuba’s zigzags between exclusive dictatorship and revolution. In her coverage of General Gerardo Machado’s 1925 successful presidential bid, for instance, McGillivray demonstrates that the last caudillo president’s election campaign created a brief “populist moment” by leveraging rising nationalist sentiment and promising “roads, water, and schools” (p. 152). At Chaparra and Delicias, empowered workers and colonos seized the opportunity and staged successful strikes, detailed in Chapter 6. Machado’s need...