Envisioning Capitalist Alternatives: Business Leaders and the Politics of Influence in Cuba, 1920-1940

My dissertation examines the organization of business leaders in voluntary associations to collaborate and compete within urban centers across Cuba. Businessmen on the island commonly used the local Rotary Club to create networks among themselves and to advance collective interests, at both local and national levels. From the crash of the sugar market in 1920, and contrary to what the historiography has established, these businessmen became increasingly disaffected with large U.S. corporate interests, rejected the continued foreign penetration of the economy, and were concerned with what they viewed as the ruin of the country at the expense of American business interests. Business leaders were not opposed to the continuation of the cash crop export economy, but they supported any alternative economic development that would find solutions to the socioeconomic challenges produced by that variant of capitalism. I argue that Cuban business leaders created a network within civic associations to promote capitalist alternatives away from the sugar industry and the foreign control of the economy. Although they were unable to fully challenge US business interests in the island, these businessmen established reform roadmaps for gradual change and envisioned the economic independence for the country within the margins of capitalism. Capitalist alternatives were centered on encouraging a civic nationalism to protect the national interest, promoting economic diversification to reduce the reliance on the sugar production, expanding the nation’s trading networks beyond the markets of the northern neighbor, investing in regional infrastructures to boost business growth and internal consumption, and reaching an economic development that mirrored industrialized nations. These business leaders sought to solve the two major economic problems affecting the nation: sugar monoculture and the overconcentration of the nation’s export into a single market, the United States. Cuban republican order lasted for almost six decades 1902-1958, but this investigation focuses on 1920-1940. The selected periodization covers from the crash of the sugar market in 1920 to the promulgation of the last republican constitution in 1940. Within these years, Cuban businessmen created a nationalist network and platform from which to articulate their aspirations for economic change attired with the raiment of civic virtue.Doctor of Philosoph