Cassandra create column family failing silently - nosql

Question

I'm running Cassandra 1.1.9 on a two-node test cluster and trying to use cassandra-cli to create a new column family in an existing keyspace. The creation seems to succeed, but then describe claims that the column family does not exist:
[default#unknown] use test_kubrick_a;
Authenticated to keyspace: test_kubrick_a
[default#test_kubrick_a] create column family counters_bd603cd5_cf1f_45ff_8522_f871a8f0c327;
ce75766b-fca0-3d7a-9ddf-646a63149e04
Waiting for schema agreement...
... schemas agree across the cluster
[default#test_kubrick_a] describe counters_bd603cd5_cf1f_45ff_8522_f871a8f0c327;
Sorry, no Keyspace nor ColumnFamily was found with name: counters_bd603cd5_cf1f_45ff_8522_f871a8f0c327
The server logs also indicate that creation was successful:
tail -f /var/log/cassandra/system.log
INFO [RPC-Thread:82640] 2013-07-25 09:34:03,604 MigrationManager.java (line 177) Create new ColumnFamily: org.apache.cassandra.config.CFMetaData#6b4611b[cfId=16865,ksName=test_kubrick_a,cfName=counters_bd603cd5_cf1f_45ff_8522_f871a8f0c327,cfType=Standard,comparator=org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.BytesType,subcolumncomparator=<null>,comment=,readRepairChance=0.1,dclocalReadRepairChance=0.0,replicateOnWrite=true,gcGraceSeconds=864000,defaultValidator=org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.BytesType,keyValidator=org.apache.cassandra.db.marshal.BytesType,minCompactionThreshold=4,maxCompactionThreshold=32,keyAlias=<null>,columnAliases=[],valueAlias=<null>,column_metadata={},compactionStrategyClass=class org.apache.cassandra.db.compaction.SizeTieredCompactionStrategy,compactionStrategyOptions={},compressionOptions={sstable_compression=org.apache.cassandra.io.compress.SnappyCompressor},bloomFilterFpChance=<null>,caching=KEYS_ONLY]
INFO [MigrationStage:1] 2013-07-25 09:34:05,166 ColumnFamilyStore.java (line 679) Enqueuing flush of Memtable-schema_columnfamilies#1842686868(1958/5565 serialized/live bytes, 20 ops)
INFO [FlushWriter:115] 2013-07-25 09:34:05,167 Memtable.java (line 264) Writing Memtable-schema_columnfamilies#1842686868(1958/5565 serialized/live bytes, 20 ops)
INFO [FlushWriter:115] 2013-07-25 09:34:05,272 Memtable.java (line 305) Completed flushing /videoplaza/cassandra/datac/data/system/schema_columnfamilies/system-schema_columnfamilies-hf-21754-Data.db (2030 bytes) for commitlog position ReplayPosition(segmentId=1374476230336, position=20511454)
I see the same behaviour when trying to use Astyanax to create the column family, so this is not an issue with the client.