Winds of Change. By Louis A. Pérez. The University of North Carolina Press, 199 pages, $49.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Hurricanes have always been a way of life for the Cuban people. Yet, except for strictly weather-related reports, there haven’t been many accounts of how hurricanes affected people, says Louis Pérez, professor of history.

Choosing three major hurricanes of the nineteenth century—in 1842, 1844, and 1846—Pérez combines first- person narratives and economic records to show the catastrophic effects hurricanes had on the well-being of Cubans—socially, politically, economically, and culturally. Pérez pored over documents, including petitions people had written to obtain government reimbursement for possessions they had lost, at the National Archives in Cuba. A working-class family may have had, for instance, two beds, one bureau, one table, pots and pans—and then after the hurricane, nothing. “The petitions became a remarkable profile of material possessions,” Pérez says.

Pérez says the book focuses on how the hurricanes affected agriculture. During the hurricanes, for instance, many crops such as coffee were devastated and never regained much growth. Slaves who had previously worked on coffee estates were then bought by owners of sugar plantations. Eventually this shift in labor allowed sugar to become the number one crop in Cuba. Pérez explains that if there had not been a loss in coffee production, then the sugar farmers would not have had the manpower to keep up with the international demand for sugar.

Pérez also discusses how hurricanes contributed to Cuba’s ties with the United States, both culturally and economically, as Spain was unwilling to help out Cuba in its times of devastation.

“Even today,” Pérez says, “there are probably no people in Latin America who like Americans more than Cubans—they are very comfortable with American culture despite having a government that is hostile to the U.S. government.”

Included in the book are Cuban narratives and poems, showing how hurricanes were integrated into virtually every aspect of Cuban life.

As Pérez explains, before arriving in Cuba most settlers had never seen a hurricane, so their writings are very dramatic—full of colorful language and rich metaphors—as they tried to capture for the reader what they were seeing.

“It is through poetry that the meaning of the hurricane obtained some of its most enduring representations,” Pérez says.