The tobacco histories of Cuba and Bahia, in the northeast of Brazil, have each been studied primarily in their own right. During the centuries of Spanish and Portuguese tobacco monopolies during the colonial rule of Cuba and Brazil, their two histories have largely been signposted on parallel tracks. Yet exploring their histories after the loosening of Portuguese monopoly impositions in Brazil in 1808 and the end of the Spanish monopoly’s Factoría in Cuba in 1817 shows that, while they were distinct in many ways, there were also connections.
The relatively peaceful independence of Brazil was achieved in 1822 (formally recognised by Portugal in 1825), alongside the more tumultuous independence struggles of the mainland Spanish territories in the Americas of the early nineteenth century. Cuba, along with Spain’s other Caribbean island territories of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, remained a Spanish colony. After protracted struggle and occupation by newly independent Haiti – previously Saint Domingue, the French western part of Hispaniola – Dominican independence from Spain was finally achieved in the latter part of the century. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained Spanish until the end of the century, in 1898, when Puerto Rico became part of the United States, which it still is today, while Cuba, after two US occupations in 1898-1902 and 1906-9, became a heavily US-mediated republic from 1902 up until its 1959 Revolution.
Already in the late eighteenth century, however, contraband trading and wars between European imperial powers in the region had weakened Portuguese control of Brazil and Spanish control of Cuba, enabling incursions, notably of the British, who also occupied Havana in 1762-3. This paved the way for broader foreign trade and investment in the burgeoning nineteenth-century sugar and tobacco economies of both Cuba and Bahia, and in neither was slavery finally abolished until nearing the end of the century – Cuba in 1886 and Brazil in 1888.
This paper on Cuban and Bahian tobacco is one of several histories centred around the Cuban cigar that I have been documenting during two key periods: the nineteenth century, par excellence that of the hand-rolled cigar prior to the later global dominance of cigarettes, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the cigar made a comeback. Doing so has enabled me to see these histories as counterpoints within tobacco itself, beyond the celebrated counterpoints fashioned for tobacco and sugar in Cuba and tobacco, sugar and cassava for the Brazilian Recôncavo region of Bahia.
The paper first provides the broader context for developments in Cuba and Bahia through tobacco’s successive periods of globalisation. It then charts in more detail the seemingly disconnected histories of Cuba and Bahia on both a macro and micro level, highlighting connections locally and globally. An often-overlooked aspect of tobacco history is the type of tobacco grown and how it is processed and consumed, and here the differences are highlighted in not only Cuban and Bahian tobacco but also the connected histories of the Iberian middle-Atlantic territories of Spain’s Canary Islands and the Portuguese Azores. The paper ends by signalling how contemporary marketing and branding have fashioned a whole smoking culture that helps explain the cigar’s resilience today; reiterating the importance of studying circuits of people and knowledge in commodity history; and calling for further study in the field of comparative labour history, which is barely touched on here.