Among the factors inhibiting development of diversified economic structures in many Caribbean and Latin American countries, the persistence of monoculture plays a crucial role. Examining Cuba as a case study, Laird Bergad uses extensive data from Cuban archival sources to analyze the social and economic structures of a country shaped by monocultural sugar production since the mid-eighteenth century. He focuses on Matanzas, the center of the Cuban slave-based sugar economy, and shows how dependence on this one product generated great wealth but ultimately produced an unstable society in which most people remained poor and illiterate. A provocative account of nineteenth-century Cuban rural society emerges from the collective portrait of the social sectors that forged the history of Matanzas's sugar production. Bergad depicts the interaction among planters, merchants, slave traders, slaves, and free blacks while showing how sugar monoculture adapted to social and economic changes. He presents a detailed study of the economics of slave labor and new data that challenges prior interpretations of Cuban slavery.

A study of marriage patterns in 19th-century Cuba

This book examines a rarely studied yet crucial group of insurgents who fought for Cuban independence from Spain during the 19th century: rebel women known as mambisas. Coming from a wide variety of backgrounds--rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, young and old--these women determinedly and passionately helped forge Cuba's new national identity. They wrote political pamphlets, carried military correspondence across enemy lines, raised money in New York and raised their families in rebel camps, served as nurses, and fought on the rebel army's front lines. In defeat or victory, imprisonment or exile, their stories are fascinating and compelling. Parallel to the evolution of the Cuban nationalist process, another social phenomenon was occurring--the growth of feminist consciousness. The rebel women's participation in the anticolonial struggle encouraged many of these women to question their role and position within their families and society. In a dramatic shift of cultural attitudes, many women began to view themselves as equal partners with men. This is the first work that explores how women shaped the war and were in turn shaped by it. Mambisas puts a human face on the Cuban struggle for independence, while at the same time examining the connection between nationalism and feminism in 19th-century Cuba.

This work brings together some of the most perceptive observations of Cuba by 19th-century travellers from America and Europe. This century saw Cuba struggling to emerge as a modern nation; hence, these travel accounts give us a first-hand view of how modernisation directly affected those living in Cuba. A broad spectrum of topics are addressed - the sugar plantations, Cuban rural and urban society, slavery, hospitals, social life and Havana.

Challenges dominant interpretations of colonialism's impact on the economy and social structuring of a US-owned Caribbean colony.

Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.

"This volume is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a "path to manumission," the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty"--