Sensing Sugaropolis: Globalising Sense Histories through the Sounds, Tastes, and Smells of Sugar

Since 1959, Cuba has promoted socialist development goals in the countryside through measures targeting class-based inequalities, including land redistributions and, more recently, decentralisation and support for small farmers in the name of food sovereignty. Yet the continued emphasis on class-based inequalities eclipses racialised forms of differentiation and experiences of anti-blackness in the Cuban countryside. Few studies analyse the role of Afro-descendant ‘peasants’ in the first socialist agrarian reforms of the 1960s; even fewer consider their access to land under the latest land Decree-Laws since the 1990s. In this paper, we use secondary historical research, land use data, proxy variables and ethnographic accounts of interviewed African Cuban farmers and agricultural workers to reflect on the role of people of African descent in Cuba’s pre- and post-1959 agrarian transformations. We identify continuities between past and present racial inequalities in the Cuban countryside, beginning with slavery and exacerbated by the racial capitalisation of Oriente (Eastern Cuba) inflicted in the early 20th century by US sugar interests. We argue that present-day romanticisations of re-peasantisation in Cuba are largely embedded in the language of the old agrarian question, which, with its central focus on class, overlooks racialised forms of differentiation and everyday experiences of anti-blackness that have long existed, and continue to exist, in Cuba. Through this preliminary exploration we are beginning to redress scholarly silences in previous research on agrarian transformations in Cuba, including those in our own work.