The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World by Charlotte Cosner (review)

At the end of chapter six of her book The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World, Charlotte Cosner describes Seville’s Real Fábrica de Tabaco in exacting detail. After noting how many women and men (and horses) worked in the process of pulverizing, rolling and casing Cuban tobacco leaves into cigars, she mentions that in the central hall of this building, “[i]n the form of two paintings by Francisco de Goya, rendered at a cost of four thousand reales, His Royal Highness King Carlos IV and his queen, María Luisa de Parma, watcher over the [Seville’s] factory’s daily activities” (132). The gaze of the King and Queen disciplining the workers’ routine gives a good idea of the book’s central topic: the ways in which this American plant shaped modern-Cuba and in turn determined Spanish Imperial policy, not only inside the island, but also in its relations to other Atlantic Empires such as England or France and nascent American Nation-States.

Through detailed archival study, as well as shrewd engagement with a number of popular secondary sources, Cosner investigates eighteenth-nineteenth century Cuban tobacco production and trade. Focusing on the northwestern most tip of the Island—known during the Spanish colony as Nueva Filipinas, and today as Pinar del Río (home of the world renowned Vuelta Abajo tobacco)—Cosner’s book makes good on triple bet. First, she challenges commonly held notions that continue to link tobacco growers—known in Cuba as vegueros—to a particular ethnic type: that of the independent, impoverished and white male immigrant isleño, a native of the Canary Islands. Secondly, she clarifies the ways in which the estanco (the Colonial-run monopoly on tobacco leaf sales) was a biopolitical machine that changed the ethnic composition of Cuba through Peninsular immigration to the island while also linking all social strata of Cuban society through the legal and illegal (contraband) commerce of the leave. Lastly, through the study of Spanish colonial functionaries’ tenure as Colonial estanco officials working in Cuba, Cosner emphasizes tobacco’s utmost importance as a commodity for the Spanish crown, constituting, at the time, of three quarters of the imports routinely shipped from Spanish colonial possessions to the Iberian Peninsula.

Since Fernando Ortiz’ foundational 1940 lyric portrait of Tobacco in Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar [Cuban Counterpoint], it is routinely asserted that the cultivation of tobacco was in the hands of impoverished white immigrant farmers coming from the Canary Islands (which is held in direct contrast with the repressive structure of the sugar economy). By revising the tazmías—colonial documents attesting to local production of tobacco in each vega [farm]—Cosner challenges this idea showing the importance of the participation not only of canarios, but of slaves, freed blacks, criollos and peninsulares in the growth of this tropical crop. Cosner’s project is particular noteworthy in the emphasis it places on the disciplinary power that tobacco harvesting had in the daily routines of slaves’ and in the lives of the indigent female population housed in the Casas de Beneficencia (Charity Houses).

Cosner’s analysis is also strong when it shows the ways in which the Spanish Imperial tobacco monopoly produced a new Cuban population and how this population, in turn, resisted the estanco. By unearthing a history of the revolts local growers unleashed during the eighteenth century against Spanish control over tobacco sales, Crosner shows that as much as the monopoly was a huge economic success for the Spanish Crown, it instilled an anti-Spanish feeling in the masses of Cuban tobacco planters. Imperial retaliations for local rebellions against monopolistic laws—ranging from imprisonment to dismemberment and exhibition of body parts in towns—was a double-edged sword that assured subjection to Spanish rule but also planted the seeds for nationalisms that gained momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century. Additionally, Cosner shows how Bourbon...