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Smoker beyond the Sea: The Story of Puerto Rican Tobacco

Online ISBN:
9781496842152
Print ISBN:
9781496842107
Publisher:
University Press of Mississippi
Book

Smoker beyond the Sea: The Story of Puerto Rican Tobacco

Juan José Baldrich
Juan José Baldrich
University of Puerto Rico
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Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
21 October 2022
Online ISBN:
9781496842152
Print ISBN:
9781496842107
Publisher:
University Press of Mississippi

Abstract

This volume traces the deep changes affecting Puerto Rican tobacco growers and manufacturers and their export markets from the European discovery of the island to the present. It examines the transitions from medicinal uses, the manufacture of tobacco rolls fit for chewing and pipe smoking, followed by the appropriation of the Cuban paradigm for cigars and cigarettes, and, finally, to the US models after the 1898 invasion. It also offers the only history of the US tobacco monopoly in agriculture and manufacture from its beginning in 1899 to the bankruptcy of its last successor company forty years later. This research offers a multidisciplinary approach to the history of tobacco that documents the organization of the cigar and cigarette manufacturing sectors and the resulting development of trade unions and socialist ideals. This investigation also gives due attention to the modifications that farmers made to tobacco planting and harvesting techniques in fine tuning them to the expected aromas and tastes of the manufactured commodities. The book also provides the only narrative of the rise and maturity of the Hermanos Cheos, a powerful apocalyptical movement, that began and spread in the tobacco growing regions. The volume pays considerable attention to gender relations in the labor process not only in the manufacturing sector but also in tobacco agriculture.

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