Sugar, Empire, and Revolution in Eastern Cuba: The Guantánamo Sugar Company Records in the Cuban Heritage Collection

Abstract

The Guantánamo Sugar Company Records in the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami represent some of the only accessible plantation documents for the province of Guantánamo in republican Cuba. Few scholars have researched in the collection and there have not been any publications to draw from it. Such a rich collection allows scholars to tie the province‘s local political, economic, and social dynamics with larger national, regional, and global processes. This is consistent with ongoing scholarly efforts to understand local and global interactions and to pay more attention to regional differences within Cuba. This research note uses the records to explore local issues of land, labor, and politics in republican-era Guantánamo in the context of larger national and international processes. The collection is especially useful for what it illustrates about Cuban sugar companies during the Revolution that succeeded in 1959. The note then identifies sources that could be useful for scholars researching in the growing fields of the history of business, science and technology, and the environment.