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13 Transnationalism and the Havana Cigar Commodity Chains, Networks, and Knowledge Circulation Jean Stubbs After the 1959 Cuban revolution, when the United States declared its trade embargo on Cuba, the race was on to produce a quality “Havana cigar” and leaf elsewhere in the Caribbean. This was a new twist to a long history. By the mid-nineteenth century the handmade “Havana” had become world famous as the luxury cigar, and while by the mid-twentieth century, in Cuba and the world over, cigarettes far out-shadowed cigars in terms of production and sales, the Havana still held its own niche luxury market. It also lay at the heart of transnational processes linked to commodity chains, networks, and knowledge circulation. Seed, agricultural and industrial know-how, and human capital were all transplanted for its replication, a process accentuated by major migratory waves linked to such landmark political upheavals as Cuba’s late nineteenth-century struggles for independence from Spain, early twentieth -century U.S. occupation, and the mid-century revolution. This led to often-disputed identical brands, produced in Cuba and abroad, by island and émigré Cubans; distributed through parallel chains, networks, and circuits; and promoted through high-profile cigar conferences and events, both in Cuba and abroad. In turn, this phenomenon created a complex multi-tiered licit and illicit system that aimed to capitalize on the prestige of the “authentic ” product. A similar phenomenon is to be observed in brand disputes and international court cases regarding other products of Cuba, most notably rum—Bacardi and Havana Club being a case in point. The Havana cigar, however, has been elevated to almost iconic status, which makes it of particular interest as a prism to explore broader issues. Here I have chosen three Caribbean island territories—Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic —to illustrate this. Each played a major part in Havana cigar history, and the fortunes of all three have waxed and waned in tandem with not only Cuba but also their own transnational commodity and migration histories. Jean Stubbs 228 A Framework for Understanding the Global Havana Cigar Global commodity chain analysis1 tends to focus on the substitution of a product or parts of a product by other such products that are cheaper to produce, different in quality, or new on the market; and on opportunities for traders to reorganize supply and create consumer alternatives, unbound by former dependencies and monopolies of suppliers. The appearance of new products or varieties does not necessarily entail the collapse of the older chain because parallel structures frequently develop. The emergence of informal or illicit economies and their impact on a chain are more difficult to trace, yet these hidden parts of a global commodity chain may be essential to an understanding of its entire functioning. Historians have frequently presented chains as linear connections among producers, traders, and consumers. Extending the analysis to encompass networks and circuits of knowledge challenges us to understand the fragilities and disconnections of their political, social, and cultural dimensions.2 The Havana cigar as a global commodity cannot be understood as an element in a primarily economic chain but, rather, as an article shaped by markers whose political, social, cultural, and migratory ramifications not only create parallel, substitute, informal, and illicit commodity networks but also whole competing social and cultural worlds and imaginaries. In this process neighboring Caribbean islands and surrounding mainland territories—the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Puerto Rico—feature prominently. They are, however, part of a far wider network of territories, ranging from the Americas—Brazil (Bahía), Colombia (El Carmen), Ecuador (close to Quito), and the United States (Connecticut, Florida-Georgia, New York)—to Europe (the Canary Islands), Africa (Cameroon), and Asia (the Philippines and Indonesia).3 Agricultural science and technology (that is, management, land tenure, labor , migration, and consumption patterns) and forms of communication all play a part in this complex. Thus the publication Cigar Aficionado, from its founding in the early 1990s, was highly successful in engineering—socially and culturally as well as commercially—an anti-antismoking campaign to promote the consumption of cigars, nurturing a cult of “cigar cool” whose epitome was the Havana.4 Written for the connoisseur and punctuated by aggressive marketing , its articles signal where Havana seed leaf is being grown outside of Cuba, and by whom, and also who is manufacturing and marketing off-island Havanas, and where. This, then, is the world of the “offshore Havana cigar,” or what those in the trade...

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