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This book examines the modernization of the Cuban sugar industry from the end of the Cuban War of Independence throughout the ensuing boom in the sugar industry. An underlying theme of the book is the close connection between the technical and organizational changes in the Cuban sugar industry and the technological changes behind the managerial revolution in industrial countries. The technical changes in the sugar industry, marked by the diffusion of mass production technologies and the adoption in Cuba of modern central factories, were characteristic of most progressive industries of that time. In general, the application of mass production technologies heralded the transition from proprietorships to modern hierarchical and corporate forms of business organization. This book links the development in the Cuban sugar industry to the global movement in business organization and technology that has been referred to as the rise of managerial capitalism. The first three decades of the twentieth century have been recognized as critical in Cuba's history, because the economic foundations -- including the rise of sugar latifundismo -- were laid for the Cuban revolution. Most of the existing literature has focused on the social impact of the profound socio-economic and institutional changes that came with the massive entrance of capital from North America. The line of investigation in this book is unique in that it examines the economic factors that underlay these socio-economic and institutional changes. What have frequently been seen as the effects of political intervention or imperialism the author identifies as economic outcomes caused by mass production technology. This is the firstbook to apply the tools of the "new economic history" to Cuba, complementing traditional historical methods with rigorous use of economic theory, transaction-cost economics, and quantitative methods to arrive at its conclusions.
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 dramatic history of an ingredient that changed the world “offers up a number of fascinating stories” (The New York Times Book Review). Sugar explores the history behind the sweetness, revealing, among other stories, how powerful American interests deposed Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii; how Hitler tried to ensure a steady supply of beet sugar when enemies threatened to cut off Germany’s supply of overseas cane sugar; and how South Africa established a domestic ethanol industry in the wake of anti-apartheid sugar embargos. The book follows the role of sugar in world events and in individual lives up to the present day, showing how it made eating on the run socially acceptable and played an integral role in today’s fast food culture and obesity epidemic. Impressively researched and commandingly written, Sugar will forever change perceptions of this tempting treat. “A highly readable and comprehensive study of a remarkable product.” —The Independent “Epic in ambition and briskly written.” —The Wall Street Journal “Readers will never again be able to casually sweeten tea or eat sweets without considering the long and fascinating history of sugar.” —Booklist
One of the key issues that faces Cuban policymakers today, and will continue to face them, is what steps to take in order to ensure the future of the sugar industry. In 2002, nearly one-half of the country's cultivated land was occupied by the 156 fully functional sugar mills, more than a dozen plants and refineries, and the complex transportation infrastructure brought about by the commerce. The loss of preferential markets for Cuban sugar that arose from the demise of the international socialist community constitutes a crisis that the Cuban government has only begun to address, with a radical restructuring plan that would foresee the reduction of sugar land and the elimination of about 100,000 jobs, for increased economic emphasis on tourism. The radical premise of this volume is that there is a future in the twenty-first century for a reinvented Cuban sugar agroindustry, responsive to market signals, organized around smaller and more agile production units, producing raw sugar as well as high value-added outputs, and using some of the facilities to produce ethanol and generate electricity. The editors have asked over a dozen recognized world experts on Cuban agroindustry to analyze specific topics and make recommendations that would not only reinvent an industry for effective transition to a free-market environment but that has the potential to reinvigorate the Cuban economy, providing employment opportunities and generating wealth for generations of Cubans to come.
Nineteenth-century Cuba led the world in sugar manufacture and technological innovation was central to this. Through the story of a group of forgotten migrant workers who anonymously contributed to Cuba's development, this book explores the development of the Cuban sugar industry and how the country became bound into global networks.
'The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery' explores how, in an age of industry and abolition, ambitious planters in the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil expanded slavery by collaborating with a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other 'plantation experts' to assist them in adapting the technologies of the Industrial Revolution to suit 'tropical' needs
Cuba's first republican era (1902–1959) is principally understood in terms of its failures and discontinuities, typically depicted as an illegitimate period in the nation's history, its first three decades and the overthrow of Machado at best a prologue to the "real" revolution of 1959. State of Ambiguity brings together scholars from North America, Cuba, and Spain to challenge this narrative, presenting republican Cuba instead as a time of meaningful engagement—socially, politically, and symbolically. Addressing a wide range of topics—civic clubs and folkloric societies, science, public health and agrarian policies, popular culture, national memory, and the intersection of race and labor—the contributors explore how a broad spectrum of Cubans embraced a political and civic culture of national self-realization. Together, the essays in State of Ambiguity recast the first republic as a time of deep continuity in processes of liberal state- and nation-building that were periodically disrupted—but also reinvigorated—by foreign intervention and profound uncertainty. Contributors. Imilcy Balboa Navarro, Alejandra Bronfman, Maikel Fariñas Borrego, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Marial Iglesias Utset, Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras Arenas, Ricardo Quiza Moreno, Amparo Sánchez Cobos, Rebecca J. Scott, Robert Whitney
Between 1920 and 1940, Cuba underwent a remarkable transition, moving from oligarchic rule to a nominal constitutional democracy. The events of this period are crucial to a full understanding of the nation's political evolution, yet they are often glossed over in accounts that focus more heavily on the revolution of 1959. With this book, Robert Whitney accords much-needed attention to a critical stage in Cuban history. Closely examining the upheavals of the period, which included a social revolution in 1933 and a military coup led by Fulgencio Batista one year later, Whitney argues that the eventual rise of a more democratic form of government came about primarily because of the mass mobilization by the popular classes against oligarchic capitalism, which was based on historically elite status rather than on a modern sense of nation. Although from the 1920s to the 1940s politicians and political activists were bitterly divided over what "popular" and "modern" state power meant, this new generation of politicians shared the idea that a modern state should produce a new and democratic Cuba.
The Cuban Revolution offers a reflective account of what the Revolution has meant to various actors such as the dominant powers, the Third World, fellow revolutionaries, intellectuals and Cuban citizens at different periods in its history. Rather than offer a simple narrative of events, Geraldine Lievesley addresses significant themes with which the Revolution has engaged and the problems that it has encountered.
Early in the twentieth century, the Cuban sugarcane industry faced a labor crisis when Cuban and European workers balked at the inhumane conditions they endured in the cane fields. Rather than reforming their practices, sugar companies gained permission from the Cuban government to import thousands of black workers from other Caribbean colonies, primarily Haiti and Jamaica. Black Labor, White Sugar illuminates the story of these immigrants, their exploitation by the sugarcane companies, and the strategies they used to fight back. Philip A. Howard traces the socioeconomic and political circumstances in Haiti and Jamaica that led men to leave their homelands to cut, load, and haul sugarcane in Cuba. Once there, the field workers, or braceros, were subject to marginalization and even violence from the sugar companies, which used structures of race, ethnicity, color, and class to subjugate these laborers. Howard argues that braceros drew on their cultural identities-from concepts of home and family to spiritual worldviews-to interpret and contest their experiences in Cuba. They also fought against their exploitation in more overt ways. As labor conditions worsened in response to falling sugar prices, the principles of anarcho-syndicalism converged with the Pan-African philosophy of Marcus Garvey to foster the evolution of a protest culture among black Caribbean laborers. By the mid-1920s, this identity encouraged many braceros to participate in strikes that sought to improve wages as well as living and working conditions. The first full-length exploration of Haitian and Jamaican workers in the Cuban sugarcane industry, Black Labor, White Sugar examines the industry's abuse of thousands of black Caribbean immigrants, and the braceros' answering struggle for power and self-definition.