| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Winds of Change: Hurricanes & the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba. By Louis A. Pérez Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. x, 199 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2613-8. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8078-4928-6.)

With this book, Louis A. Pérez Jr. makes a valuable contribution to the small but growing number of Latin American case studies in the field of environmental history. Pioneered by such historians as Alfred Crosby and Warren Dean, environmental approaches to Latin America attempt to insert the agency of the natural world into examinations of human thought, political action, and constructions of the social order. In general, they contend that the way groups perceive each other, the world around them, and their relationship to it has everything to do with the direction and scope of ideological and structural change.

For the case of nineteenth-century Cuba, Pérez argues that the havoc that a consecutive series of hurricanes wreaked on western planters served as a "catalyst" for the abandonment of more diversified forms of agriculture (especially coffee production) and the long-term development of sugar monoculture based on slavery. What mattered, explains Pérez, was not so much the impact of the hurricanes themselves, but their timing in the socially and economically pivotal years of the 1840s:

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