Smoker beyond the Sea
Autor: Juan José Baldrich
Número de Páginas: 244In this groundbreaking volume, Juan José Baldrich traces the deep changes affecting Puerto Rican tobacco growers and manufacturers and their export markets from the Spanish colonization of the island to the present. Based on more than twenty years of research in the United States and Puerto Rico, the book sheds light on the important history of tobacco in Puerto Rico while highlighting the people and practices that have indelibly shaped Puerto Rico and its culture. Smoker beyond the Sea: The Story of Puerto Rican Tobacco is a work of recovery that examines tobacco’s transitions from medicinal use to 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. This pioneering volume also offers the only history of the US tobacco monopoly in local agriculture and manufacture from its beginning in 1899 to the bankruptcy of its last successor company forty years later. Baldrich's extensive research documents the organization of the cigar and cigarette manufacturing sectors and the resulting development of trade unions and socialist ideals. This multidisciplinary...