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62 RACES OF MAIZE found this race throughout the West Indies. Since mixtures of the Cuban dents and Mafz Argentino, an introduced Cateto Hint, have given rise in Oriente province to a type virtually in- distinguishable from the Mafz Criollo of western Cuba, it is possible that the "Coastal Tropical Flint" had a similar origin in South America, where both putative parents still exist. The widespread distribution of Ma1z Criollo in Cuba suggests that it was introduced to that island by the Sub-Taino Arawak shortly after 1200 A.D. Corn was probably of secondary importance in Arawak agri- culture. Cassava (manioc) seems to have been the principal crop, from which bread and other staple foods were prepared. Maize seems to have been eaten green, as an accessory vegetable in season to add variety to the meal, although it may have been parched as well. Cuba's relative poverty in indigenous races of maize as compared with Mexico, with its twenty-five or more distinct races, is therefore not hard to understand. To the Indians of Mexico maize was the staff of life; to the Arawak it was a delicacy. The history of Cuban corn to 1955 has involved repeated in- troductions and hybridization. There is no reason to believe these processes will not continue. Only a few years away is the acceptance by large growers of recently developed synthetic varieties and double-cross hybrids. The Atkins Garden and Re- search Laboratory has embarked on a program of testing types developed in Mexico and Colombia by the Rockefeller Founda- tion, and one of these has already come into the hands of a small grower in Esperanza, Las Villas. These tendencies can only be regarded with apprehension by the student of maize and the corn breeder. The former is in- terested primarily in working out a natural classification of a variable plant, and hopes to be able to compare the distributions and genealogies of his races with the migration of the people of the Western Hemisphere and perhaps ultimately with the origin of maize itself. The latter, confronted with a bewildering number of local variants from which to select material for breeding work, relies on the economic botanist to provide a rational inventory of his collections. It is obvious that widespread migration and
SUMMARY 63 hybridization, the results of twentieth-century technology, which tend to destroy the stability of morphological types and their geographical distributions, complicate the classification of races of maize. Cuba's situation is by no means unique. One may expect also to find the masking effects of recent introduction and hybridiza- tion present in Venezuela and other rapidly developing countries of Latin America. Brown ( 8) considered Puerto Rico's maize too complicated by the introduction of North American varieties to be susceptible to the type of analysis he applied on other West Indian islands. Fifty or more years ago the maize of Puerto Rico might have been the subject of an interesting study, for the Taino culture was apparently most highly developed on that island. It should be reemphasized that the problem is not merely an academic one. Workers of the Rockefeller Foundation discovered that an orderly natural classification of the races of maize in Mexico was a necessary prerequisite to an intelligent breeding program in that country. When similar programs are initiated in some other countries of Latin America, studies of the taxonomy of corn may no longer be practicable. SUMMARY 1. Widespread intervarietal hybridization, which introduced unforeseen complications in the study of Cuban maize, has led to modifications in the concept of race. In order to eliminate chance segregates and recent mixtures from consideration, a race of maize is defined as a group of one or more populations of true-breeding individuals with a number of significant charac- teristics in common. In addition, its recognition as an agricul- tural variety by the people who grow it should be taken into consideration. 2. True-breeding stocks of material collected in central and eastern Cuba in 1953 were studied with respect to vegetative, tassel, cytological, and physiological characters. Studies of these and later collections and interviews with more than seventy-one Cuban farmers have made it possible to describe seven races of Cuban maize.
