Blazing Cane

“Lucidly written, sophisticated, marvelously nuanced, and meticulously researched. . . . This is simply superb history. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.” - F. W. Knight, Choice
“McGillivray’s research has been terrific. . . . She has wisely combined archival documents, a considerable number of newspaper articles, and interviews, broadening her analysis and cementing her conclusions. Overall, Blazing Cane constitutes a courageous take on this aspect of the history of twentieth-century Cuba. . .” - Manuel Barcia, A Contracorriente
“McGillivray’s insistence on embedding the history of the two sugar communities within the broad sweep of Cuba’s historical development makes this book especially attractive to teachers as well as researchers. Indeed, Blazing Cane could profitably be used as the core text for courses dealing with Cuban history in the one hundred years preceding the 1959 Revolution, and as a model for how to study the interactions between local, regional, national, and transnational forces.” - Barry Carr, Hispanic American Historical Review
“Blazing Cane is in the finest tradition of Cuban rural history, while at the same time clearing a new interpretative path. . . . Blazing Cane is well suited for a general audience. The section on the Chaparra sugar mill includes 14 photographs from the mill archives, which are of such high quality that one can almost taste the sugar being processed.”
- Frank Argote-Freyre, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
“With Blazing Cane, McGillivray has given Cubanists — and Latin Americanists in general — a treat: a book both accessible to undergraduates and meaty enough for a graduate class, one that offers convincing answers to many questions and at the same time suggests new avenues of research. In so doing, Blazing Cane provides a fresh vision of Cuba in the twentieth century, tying the nation into larger regional trends rather than separating
it from them. In the end, like the cane fires that flare up throughout the book to signal moments of change, Blazing Cane may itself be a marker, lighting a new path in the study of Cuban history.” - Joshua H. Nadel, Labor
“This book offers a new understanding of Cuba’s sugar politics. It will prove essential to anyone interested in pre-1959 Cuban history or in the relationship of the middle class to state formation in Latin America.” - Aline Helg, American Historical Review
“Gillian McGillivray offers a new and original understanding of the history of Cuba from the mid-nineteenth century to the Cuban revolution by reading it from the perspective of two sugar communities. She stresses the agency of workers in sugar communities, who asserted demands and engaged with, as they helped shape, the rhetoric of the state and state formation. Blazing Cane is an important contribution to modern Cuban history, and a compelling case for the impossibility of separating the local from the national and transnational in any study.”—William French, author of A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico
“We know very little about the lives of sugar workers and their interactions with the managerial personnel of the mills in which they worked. McGillivray goes deep into documentary archives to address this vital shortcoming of the historiography of Cuba, to look at Cuban society and politics through two sugar communities. Blazing Cane gives an insightful look at how ordinary people coped with the complex and uncertain circumstances that surrounded them in the Cuban republic.”—Alejandro de la Fuente, author of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba
“Blazing Cane is in the finest tradition of Cuban rural history, while at the same time clearing a new interpretative path. . . . Blazing Cane is well suited for a general audience. The section on the Chaparra sugar mill includes 14 photographs from the mill archives, which are of such high quality that one can almost taste the sugar being processed.”
-- Frank Argote-Freyre * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *
“Lucidly written, sophisticated, marvelously nuanced, and meticulously researched. . . . This is simply superb history. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.” -- F. W. Knight * Choice *
“McGillivray’s insistence on embedding the history of the two sugar communities within the broad sweep of Cuba’s historical development makes this book especially attractive to teachers as well as researchers. Indeed, Blazing Cane could profitably be used as the core text for courses dealing with Cuban history in the one hundred years preceding the 1959 Revolution, and as a model for how to study the interactions between local, regional, national, and transnational forces.” -- Barry Carr * Hispanic American Historical Review *
“McGillivray’s research has been terrific. . . . She has wisely combined archival documents, a considerable number of newspaper articles, and interviews, broadening her analysis and cementing her conclusions. Overall, Blazing Cane constitutes a courageous take on this aspect of the history of twentieth-century Cuba. . .” -- Manuel Barcia * A Contracorriente *
“This book offers a new understanding of Cuba’s sugar politics. It will prove essential to anyone interested in pre-1959 Cuban history or in the relationship of the middle class to state formation in Latin America.” -- Aline Helg * American Historical Review *
“With Blazing Cane, McGillivray has given Cubanists — and Latin Americanists in general — a treat: a book both accessible to undergraduates and meaty enough for a graduate class, one that offers convincing answers to many questions and at the same time suggests new avenues of research. In so doing, Blazing Cane provides a fresh vision of Cuba in the twentieth century, tying the nation into larger regional trends rather than separating it from them. In the end, like the cane fires that flare up throughout the book to signal moments of change, Blazing Cane may itself be a marker, lighting a new path in the study of Cuban history.” -- Joshua H. Nadel * Labor *