Varieties of Rifts across Cuban Agriculture's Longue Duree

*This is a Latin American Perspectives event co-sponsored by The Cuba Observatory. 

In this lecture, I center Cuba as a case for comparison across four distinct periods from the 1800s to the present. Each period presents an array of interlocking colonial, incorporative, dependent, delinked, and exilic conditions shaping the extensity and intensity of agricultural production, and ipso facto rift-making and rift-mending potential. For instance, the 1800s represent a period of heightened colonialism that set limits on incorporation as a driver of extensity and intensity, representing a lower rift-making potential when compared to the post-1959 Revolution period’s heightened delinking conditioning higher rift-making potential. Through this analysis, I interrogate the theoretical contingency of rift-making and rift-mending within the capitalist world-economy.

Dr. Andrew R. Smolski is an Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at The Pennsylvania State University. Prior, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Agricultural and Human Sciences at North Carolina State University, where he earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His research centers the resilience and sustainability of agriculture and food systems in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He has been published in leading journals such as Latin American Perspectives, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Rural Sociology. Recently, he co-edited a thematic issue of Latin American Perspectives, “The Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question”. He is a Coordinating Editor of Latin American Perspectives, and a past Latin American Perspectives Fellow at the University of California, Riverside. One of his major projects involves comparative-historical analysis of how structural and institutional factors condition the sustainability of agricultural production practices implemented in Cuba and Mexico. This involves archival data collection to assemble a picture of national-level agrarian transitions across the longue duree of the capitalist world-economy. His other major project analyzes qualitative data on how small-scale farmers in the United State of America navigate farm stress and resource access according to multiple social identities (e.g., new and beginning farmer, race, gender, veteran status, etc.).