Local Eyes into Caribbean Rural Life

Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres discusses two ethnographic projects: Sidney W. Mintz’s oral history of the sugarcane worker Anastacio (Taso) Zayas Alvarado, and Carl Withers’s unpublished manuscript on the Cuban town of Mayajigua, based largely on his key informant Juan Manuel Picabia y Niebla, also known as Manolo. Canvassing the unpublished letters, interviews, and reports by both informants, Giovannetti-Torres identifies several recurrent themes in rural Cuban and Puerto Rican societies during the 1940s and 1950s, including similar sexual norms, gender relations, health conditions, folk healing remedies, and other cultural practices. By playing close attention to Taso’s and Manolo’s narratives, Giovannetti-Torres privileges “voices from below to illustrate a parallel grassroots history of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the post–World War II era. Two informants pictured societies that were about to undergo dramatic changes.” The rise and eventual fall of the Batista dictatorship (1952–58) in Cuba and the inauguration of the Free Associated State in Puerto Rico (1952) would sharpen the historical differentiation between the two countries and accelerate the rate of social and political transformation in each island.