The practice of reading aloud to tobacco workers while they work has long been recognised as a distinctive part of Cuban culture. In this fascinating study of the practice, the author not only tells us of its relationship with Cuban social, cultural and political developments, but also gives a detailed account of the nature of the literary and journalistic material that was used. This choice of material, as well as the decision-making process involved, reflects the deeper relationship between employer and employed in the Cuban tobacco industry.

The practice started in Cuban tobacco factories in the early 1860s, at a time when there was still widespread illiteracy and popular newspapers had to aim, in part, at an audience who could not read themselves, but could persuade friends or family to read to them. Indeed, in 1865 Saturnio Martínez founded a newspaper, La Aurora, with an eye to public reading. The extension of reading aloud into the tobacco industry is based upon the quiet nature of the job, meaning that the cigar rollers could talk amongst themselves without impeding their work, and it was a significant factor in their growing collective identity.

There was, of course, a central contradiction to the practice of reading aloud: the workers paid for the readings, while they took place on the employers' premises during paid time, all of which must have led to negotiations over the content and resulted in a real ‘frontier of control’. The report that the right-wing business daily Diario de la Marina was sometimes read in the Partagas factory makes the modern reader wonder whether the listening tobacco workers were mere passive receivers or whether there were loudly shouted disputes. While one cannot expect such exchanges to leave a trace, the author has done an excellent job of scouring the written record, providing us with a comprehensive listing of the books and poems that were read alongside the newspapers, as well as the link between them. Thus we learn that Victor Hugo wrote personally to La Aurora to thank the tobacco workers in the Partagas factory for listening to his novels, while presumably hoping that others would follow their example when that section of the newspaper was read out in their factory. The fact that the materials to be read were the product of negotiations is reflected in the pages of newspapers such as La Aurora, where early socialist and radical writers pitched their ideas at a level and in a form that would be understood by the workers while evading the censorship of the employers. This dual nature can be seen in the fact that the practice is credited with both increasing productivity and boosting trade union membership.

The potentially subversive nature of reading aloud at work was recognised by the more conservative employers, whose spokesmen feared it would result in increased politicisation, an opinion shared by the Spanish colonial authorities who banned the practice during the Ten Years' War; it was not reinstated until 1882. Nevertheless, the essentially reformist nature of the institution became recognised later when, although it was banned again at the outbreak of the War of Independence, threats of strike action caused the employers to call for its reinstatement, which was granted on condition that no revolutionary material was read.

If there is a criticism of the book, it is that despite the importance of reading aloud to the development of class consciousness among the Cuban tobacco workers, no real attempt has been made to place the practice in the context of the bitter struggles of the tobacco workers over wages and mechanisation. Indeed, this question of mechanisation affected the readers as much as other tobacco workers, because the use of radio undermined the tradition, while the introduction of microphones was effectively a deskilling that paralleled the introduction of the cigar rolling machine. Many employers preferred the use of the radio, even though they had to pay for it themselves, because the radio did not need breaks during which productivity dropped as the workers discussed what they had just heard.

The tradition of reading aloud has survived the competition of radio, however, and is alive and relatively well in post-revolutionary Cuba, albeit reflecting some of the changes in the industry and in Cuban society generally. Of the 230 readers that are still actively employed (they are now state employees paid a monthly salary), 137 are women, which in turn reflects changes in the gender balance in the tobacco industry. There appears still to be a wide range of literature in use, from Agatha Christie through Gabriel García Márquez to modern Cuban authors of detective fiction such as Leonardo Padura – as well, of course, as the ubiquitous Granma. We hear the inevitable complaints that young people today are less interested and less attentive, which makes one wonder whether two generations of mass literacy have undermined the appetite for the spoken word, or whether it is just that young people are always accused of failing to respect tradition and will make the same accusations in their turn in 20 years' time.

The best aspect of this book is the glimpse it provides of the interaction between reader and listener, whether silence means rapt attention or bored indifference, whether the listeners shout either to applaud and encourage or in outraged disagreement. We can never know how they would have reacted in individual cases, but the author gives us the means to understand the world in which that interaction took place.