Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898

Abstract

Emerging from an exhaustive if not exhausting meditation on the causes, contingencies and conjunctures of 1898, Cuban historiography is now turning to relatively unexamined issues in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joan Casanovas’s Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898, opens an important new area of research as it delves into the formation of an urban working class, comprised mostly of tobacco workers, and its intimate relationship to the linked processes of slave emancipation and the acquisition of independence from Spain. Casanovas challenges the teleology of narratives that see in the mid-nineteenth century rise of the labor movement the origins of a militancy that culminated in 1959. Aiming to reinsert workers’ agency and aspirations into an account dominated by a notion of workers as passive recipients of ideologies, the book focuses on local economic and political conditions as principal factors shaping labor consciousness.With an impressive accumulation of Spanish, North American, and Cuban sources, Casanovas renders a complex Cuban world of shifting colonial policy, rapidly changing demographics and a growing export economy. In addition, his field of vision rightly includes attention to Spain’s own transformations with regard to its imperial status and the nature of its domestic regime. In his account, currents of reformism, separatism, abolitionism, and pro-Spanish sentiment jostled for the loyalty of urban laborers, themselves divided between recent Spanish immigrants and Cubans of both Spanish and African origin. By the same token, once labor groups formed, they impinged on the colonial state persistently but only sometimes successfully. Casanovas integrates the consequences of an emerging collective urban labor consciousness into the momentous events of nineteenth-century Cuban history. His expansive argument includes claims that workers supported and in some ways impelled slave emancipation, dispersed to locations that would later prove strategic, such as Key West, during the war of 1868–78 and provided one of the bases upon which José Martí built a revolutionary coalition. The book makes a compelling case for the significance of the relatively neglected development of Cuba’s colonial urban labor movement.Yet it is perhaps a consequence of its well-executed ambition and scope that some issues do not receive the attention they are due. Although Casanovas includes descriptions of several aspects of workers’ lives, their “making” as a working class remains only tenuously explored. The practice of reading in cigar factories, the creation of mutual aid societies, the interracial character of many unions and the fluctuating degrees of repression all appear as evidence that some kind of change was indeed occurring. Yet in the absence of workers’ voices the texture of these changes is elusive. Hence his assertions about the appeal of anarchism over reformism only raise the question, why did workers respond to some ideologies and not others? Although the faltering commitment to reformism is persuasively argued, the turn to anarchism is given cursory treatment. The anarchist ranks grew, he argues, because its ideas were disseminated widely. This is not implausible, but it does beg the question, how did workers come to understand, adopt, and spread anarchist beliefs and practices? Casanovas has synthesized prodigious research and made key claims. If this book prompts historians to inquire more closely into the ways the Cuban urban laboring class was, as E.P. Thompson put it, “present at its own making,” that will only add to its achievement.