Caribbean

Tobacco was the first American product to conquer Europe. Its rapid acceptance throughout the world made it a profitable commodity in a very short time. Before European contact, indigenous populations' consumption of tobacco had been restricted to the plant's magical and religious purposes, and so it lacked a large market. Thus it was its European commercialization that brought about the expansion of tobacco into new production areas. From those early days until the twentieth century, at least, the Caribbean has been one of the preferred zones of tobacco production.

Small farmers, often of Spanish origin, turned to growing tobacco before the end of the sixteenth century in colonies such as Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Caracas, and Veracruz, among others. The English, French, and Dutch soon imitated them, as they too began winning territories in America.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, several European powers took possession of the Caribbean islands which not been effectively settled by Spain. All experimented with tobacco cultivation in their new territories, because it was a product with growing European demand and high value in the international market of the time. Tobacco production provided rival European powers a way to increase their participation in the Atlantic trade.

The Non-Hispanic Caribbean

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish possessions in the region—especially Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Caracas—had built up important tobacco growing regions. Encouraged by tobacco's economic potential, the first settlers of the British and French colonies in the Caribbean also began cultivating it on small parcels of land. Thus, the new Caribbean colonies and also those in North America (especially Virginia) began to grow tobacco in significant quantities. As a result an overproduction crisis ensued in 1638, precipitating a drop in prices that undermined the enthusiasm and commercial potential for tobacco in the non-Hispanic Caribbean colonies. These last were most affected by the crisis because they had encountered problems with the quality of their products, which never reached a level acceptable to European consumers. Their tobacco suffered from problems related to the preparation, wrapping and packing of the leaves; it was said that the merchandise arrived at its destination without any aroma, dry, worm eaten, and sandy.

The decline in tobacco prices, together with the low quality that failed to satisfy the tastes of increasingly demanding European consumers, led to the abandonment of tobacco growing on the non-Spanish islands of the Caribbean. By the mid-seventeenth century, tobacco farms were displaced by large sugar cane plantations in these areas, with the exception of Haiti where this crop change took place a bit later. From then on, it was the Spanish Caribbean colonies that competed with Virginia for the benefits to be gained from exporting tobacco to Europe.

By this time, the Dutch, followed by the English and French, had demonstrated that the trade in tropical products, most notably sugar, could bring spectacular profits, and the weakness of the Spanish economy in this sector was evident. To counteract that tendency and become competitive in Atlantic commerce, Spain bet on Caribbean tobacco—especially the Cuban product—viewed as the world's best and sold for the highest prices as a result.

Spanish and Cuban Tobacco

The only significant rival to Cuban tobacco was that grown in Virginia. But Virginia tobacco did not measure up to the Cuban tobacco, which was characterized by rich flavor and aroma, as well as excellent burning qualities. Its fame spread rapidly, and consumers were willing to pay its higher price, even though at times it was triple that of tobacco from other areas. Because Cuban tobacco had the cachet of a connoisseur item, it was relatively invulnerable to foreign competition. Cuban tobacco enjoyed steady demand that guaranteed good prices.

In sum, the non-Spanish islands of the Caribbean mounted an early effort in the tobacco trade, but their product did not achieve a level of quality acceptable to the European market. Spain, on the other hand, had Cuban tobacco, which enjoyed prestige and acceptance among consumers.

Spain sought to benefit from the exclusive cachet of Cuban tobacco. Accordingly, it adopted measures to stimulate Cuban production and preserve tobacco's privileged state in the market. During the eighteenth century, the Cuban tobacco trade received innumerable official stimuli and became the pride and joy of the Spanish monarchy, which elevated it at the expense of tobacco production and commerce in other regions of the empire.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Crown sent Cuba annually large sums of Mexican silver with which to purchase tobacco for shipment to Spain. To protect Cuban production from competition from other Spanish colonies and the effects of contraband, the government restricted the tobacco trade in the rest of its possessions. Such policies benefited the Cuban tobacco business but were prejudicial to other colonies, especially Caribbean ones, which from the beginning of the conquest had invested significantly in this crop.

The Case of Santo Domingo

Santo Domingo, for example, on more than one occasion requested privileges comparable to those granted Cuba. The island colony saw an opportunity in 1762, when the English invaded Cuba. The English maintained control of Havana for a year, halting Cuban tobacco shipments destined for the metropolis. Dominican authorities responded by immediately sending a shipment of Hispaniola tobacco to demonstrate its quality that, they claimed, did not in any way lag behind the Cuban product. Although not to the extent they hoped, the Dominicans did receive a response that fed their hopes. Several royal officials were dispatched to Santo Domingo with the charge of buying all the tobacco harvested in the city and its environs, and of stimulating more planting. The viceroy of New Spain received orders to send money to Santo Domingo to finance that mission. Nonetheless, this effort dissolved when the situation in Havana was normalized.

In Santo Domingo, tobacco planting had achieved some importance since at least 1680, but the bulk of the harvest was illegally sold to the French in the neighboring colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti). In response, the government in 1770 established a Factoría (tobacco agency) in its colony of Hispaniola, based in the city of Santiago. The purpose of this establishment was to buy the tobacco produced in the region and ship it to the peninsula. As in Cuba, the purchases were financed with silver from New Spain. The Dominican Factoría lasted for twenty-six years, but its function as a provider of tobacco for the metropolis never compared with that of Cuba. Still, the Factoría guaranteed Dominican growers a secure market. This was a strategy to combat the contraband trade with the neighboring French by offering the growers a sure and attractive buyer. At the same time, it provided work and income for the population of this first Spanish colony, which had become one of the poorest.

During the nineteenth century, Santo Domingo went through long periods of political instability that affected and inhibited its economy, in particular tobacco production. As a result, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the Dominicans managed to develop a more solid tobacco industry, characterized by the preeminence of peasant-based production.

The Cases of Caracas and Puerto Rico

Caracas and Puerto Rico were two other colonies that began to export tobacco in the seventeenth century and suffered from Spanish policies that favored the Cuban product. The tobacco of the Venezuelan region of Barinas, especially, had in early times enjoyed a level of prestige comparable to that of Cuba. In both colonies, smuggling of all types of goods—including tobacco—was intense and intolerable to the Spanish government. Good-quality tobacco arriving in Europe by way of illegal commerce threatened the competitiveness of the Cuban product and damaged the Spanish export trade.

In the case of Caracas, the Spanish government established a monopoly in 1779 in spite of opposition from colonial society. Under the monopoly, the state became not only the sole authorized buyer of tobacco produced in the colony, but also the exclusive seller, whether for internal or external consumption. The most distinctive feature of the Caracas monopoly was its Dutch export trade. Prior to the monopoly, the merchants of the Guipuzcoana Company controlled this trade, but with the implementation of the monopoly, several officials were dispatched to Amsterdam, Holland, to take charge of the trade in the name of the king. The Dutch government supported this arrangement and halved the duties charged on importation of Caracas tobacco if it arrived in Amsterdam through the offices of the Spanish government.

The Spanish representatives then received instructions to seek such privileges for Puerto Rican tobacco as well. From 1765 on, as part of the reform efforts that followed the invasion of Havana, the Spanish government tried to stimulate the Puerto Rican economy. It was generally accepted that one of the island's most serious problems was smuggling. The Spanish representatives in Holland reported that, according to Amsterdam merchants, around 1.5 million pounds of Puerto Rican tobacco had entered that port since 1775, suggesting that almost the entire Puerto Rican crop ended up in Holland. This helps explain why the Spanish monarchy authorized direct trade in tobacco between its Caracas and Puerto Rican colonies and Holland, channeling a longstanding practice into legal and official form. To carry out the purchases in Puerto Rico, the monarchy set up a Factoría that began functioning in 1784 and was active until the king suspended sales to Holland in 1792.

The Crisis of the Late Eighteenth Century

The end of tobacco exports to Holland coincided with a general crisis that afflicted the Spanish Empire's tobacco trade. Factors leading to this crisis include the outbreak of war with France in 1792 and the stimulus that sugar production in the Antilles received as a result of the Haitian Revolution. Tempted by the promising panorama of sugar, large planters sought to acquire as much land as possible to devote to that crop, displacing the tobacco growers onto marginal lands. Moreover, in these years the Cuban tobacco industry was in decline, despite the fact that Cuba had distinguished itself as the greatest and most prestigious tobacco producer. If that was the case in Cuba, the outlook in the other Spanish colonies was worse still.

The wars of independence of the early nineteenth century damaged the economies of the newborn nations, such as Venezuela and Santo Domingo, and they were slow to recover and to reinsert themselves into the flows of international commerce. Puerto Rico and Cuba did witness an improvement in tobacco production beginning with the 1840s, but it was always overshadowed by sugar.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw the unfolding of a new history for tobacco in the Hispanic Caribbean, under different political conditions and with different markets. The characteristics and problems of these industries have changed with the times, but the fame and prestige of their products continue to be recognized worldwide.

See Also British Empire; Cuba; Dutch Empire; French Empire; Spanish Empire.

? LAURA NÁTER

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arcila Farías, Eduardo. Historia de un monopolio: El estanco del tabaco en Venezuela, 1779–1833. Caracas: Instituto de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1977.

Céspedes del Castillo, Guillermo. El tabaco en Nueva España. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1992.

Náter, Laura. Integración imperial: El sistema de monopolios de tabaco en el Imperio español. Cuba y América en el siglo XVIII. Ph.D. diss., El Colegio de México, 2000.

Price, Jacob M. France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973.

plantation historically, a large agricultural estate dedicated to producing a cash crop worked by laborers living on the property. Before 1865, plantations in the American South were usually worked by slaves.

contraband trade traffic in a banned or outlawed commodity. Smuggling.