Revolution, Reprisal, and Repression
An intro to how agriculture, worker organizing, and revolution have long been tied together
Not long ago the forests of Utuado were an endless expanse of coffee trees, and before that they were hills completely covered in tobacco. For two generations Puerto Rico supplied the world’s best tobacco, accompanying and occasionally substituting for Cuba-grown leaves that make up Cuban cigars.12
Inside of those tobacco warehouses skilled cigar rollers knocked their knives against the tables to both applaud impressive lectors and to protest oppressive bosses. From Les Misérables to Marx, lectors’ stories did more than occupy minds during monotonous labor, they explained the worker’s place in the world. A perfect combination of worker education and empowerment, tobacco led to revolts.
A direct line can be drawn from the Cuban tradition of lectors—practiced here and everywhere that tobacco work went—to the modern Puerto Rican independence movement. In Utuado, the tobacco strikes for better wages and working conditions prompted strikes across sugar and coffee workers, truck and taxi drivers, bakers, and workers in textiles and construction. Our mountain town became a hotbed for union and independence organizing.3
Luisa Capetillo,4 a lectora/journalist/anarchist from Arecibo who read to tobacco workers throughout the Carribean, in the American South and up in New York, wrote:5
“Education is the foundation of happiness among people. Teach under the canopy of truth; slash open the veil of ignorance, by showing the true light of progress, free of rites and dogmas... Ignorance is the cause of the greatest crimes and injustices.”
Over the next few months we will be sharing in-depth research about how agriculture, worker organizing, and revolution have long been tied together, but have not come without reprisal and repression. Stay tuned to see what’s coming.
Picó, Fernando. Historia General de Puerto Rico. Ediciones Huracán. 2006.
“A Puerto Rican Tradition: Over 500 Years of Rolling Tobacco.” https://www.don-collins.com/history
Picó, Fernando. Los Gallos Peleados. Ediciones Huracán. 1983.
Spiegel, Taru. “Luisa Capetillo: Puerto Rican Changemaker.” Library of Congress Blogs. November 18, 2019.
Tinajero, Araceli. El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. University of Texas Press. 2007.