Abstract
Plantations have mainly been studied as precursor forms of capitalism or as their most exemplary outcome, as a system which relies on the alienation of workers and non-human actors and the production or reproduction of racial, national and gender discrimination. Exploring former workers’ nostalgia about their municipality’s plantation past and its multiple meanings, this chapter describes how citrus plantations have come to materialize the promises of development and modernity of the Cuban Revolution and to embody the Socialist State’s sovereignty in marginal areas of Western Cuba. State sovereignty was instituted through boundary drawing and processes of exclusion-inclusion that crystallize around the constitution of state property and state farms. The plantation transformed people’s life and working conditions, linking new norms and values to personal experiences of upward mobility. As the plantation collapsed, diverging accounts of its demise keep asserting State Sovereignty as a form of vanished normality.
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Notes
- 1.
I draw on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Arenas during 16 months from 2016 to 2018 and shorter visits in 2019 and 2022, archives from Pinar del Rio Historical Archives, the State’s Departments of Agriculture and Spatial Planning in Pinar del Rio and private collections owned by my interlocutors in Arenas. All names and locations have been anonymized to protect my informants whom I thank for their trust and help. To avoid putting them at risk, some of their distinctive social features and part of their stories were modified in such a way that do not affect the general argument of the paper. I would like to thank Marta Macedo, Irene Peano, Colette Le Petitcorps, Birgit Müller, Marie-Laure Geoffray, Felix Traoré, Kateryna Soroka, Gala Aguero, Benoit de L’Estoile for their insights and feedbacks on earlier versions of this chapter.
- 2.
In the following section, I rely on unpublished manuscripts written by historians of the municipality. The historian (el historiador) of the municipality is a civil servant, usually holding a degree in history and closely linked to the municipal section of the Communist Party. From the 1980s, the Cuban Communist Party gave orientation to create working groups under the supervision of the municipal historians to gather testimonies and archives and to write down the history of each municipio. In Arenas, several manuscripts were written from the beginning of the 1990s and the end of the 2000s by several historiadores and sometimes, their team of volunteers. To preserve anonymity of the location and of the other informants, I cannot cite their writings here although I am grateful for their precious work.
- 3.
In 1964, the plan designed for the area forecast the development of 16,000 ha of citrus trees and 2000 ha of mango trees. In 1970, “198 caballerias” of citrus trees (around 2650 ha) were reported to have been planted according to the municipal historians. By the mid-1980’s, Arenas’s citrus plantations covered around 20,000 ha (measure taken from satellite maps and maps from the archives of the Dirección Provincial de Planificación Física de Pinar del Río). The main production were oranges, and to a lesser extent grapefruit and limes (Nova González 1996; see also Ríos Hernández 2014).
- 4.
From 1961 to 1965, a counter-revolutionary war took place in the Escambray Mountains, in the centre of the Island. Johanna Swanger argues that the insurrection aroused and gained support within the peasants of the area, a mainly white population, amidst fears that the Land Reform would be reverted, that the State would collectivize land threatening property rights and destroy the values of a white and patriarchal society promoting women education, racial equality, or homosexuality and interracial marriages. The revolutionary government, arguing that it was an attempt of the CIA to overthrow the newly instated Revolution severely fought against the insurrection. In 1963, revolutionary authorities enforced massive displacements to cut the insurgents from local supports and sent entire villages to camps. Alongside the victory of the Bay of Pigs, the “Battle of the Escambray” became a founding moment in the official history of the Revolutionary fight against US imperialism (Swanger 2015).
- 5.
The commercial cultivation of citrus fruits in Cuba was introduced by American settlers at the end of the nineteenth century, following frosts that strongly affected production in Florida. The crop was intended above all for export to North America. However, its development in Cuba was limited throughout the first half of the twentieth century due to the significant increase in production in Florida and California, which were in direct competition with Cuban exports (Jiménez Villasuso and Zamora Rodriguez 2010; Ríos Hernández 2014: 113). Technical assessment for the crop was not properly structured and little research had been conducted on variety selection before the 1970s.
- 6.
Skin colour and race are mentioned here as they are integral to people’s self-identification in Arenas’s social space alongside gender or age. I use the categories people used in my presence to talk about themselves.
- 7.
Imports fell by 75% for oil, 78% for fertilizers and pesticides, and 50% for food (Wright 2009: 67).
- 8.
Granja and lote are designations that referred to different ways of organizing state farms between the 1960s and 1990s when the main concern was the adequate size of the “production units”.
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Aureille, M. (2023). Nostalgia for Oranges: Plantations as a Development Promise in Socialist Cuba. In: Le Petitcorps, C., Macedo, M., Peano, I. (eds) Global Plantations in the Modern World. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08537-6_5
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