Sugar Industry

Carried to the New World from the Spanish Canary Islands by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, sugar was first grown in the New World in Spanish Santo Domingo and was exported to Europe beginning around 1516. Santo Domingo's incipient sugar industry was worked by African slaves who were imported soon after the sugarcane itself. Thus, Spain pioneered growing sugarcane, making sugar, using African slaves as labor, and establishing the plantation form in the Americas.

Within the New World, however, the early achievements in Santo Domingo and the rest of the Caribbean were surpassed by developments on the mainland. By 1526 Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon in commercial quantities. In Mexico, Paraguay, the Pacific coast of South America, and in fertile valleys everywhere, sugarcane thrived. In the other Greater Antilles—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica—Spanish settlers eventually imported sugarcane plants, the methods for their cultivation, the technology of water and animal-powered mills, enslaved labor, and the processes of grinding, boiling, and fabricating sugars, creating molasses from extracted sugar juice, and distilling rum from the molasses.

Portuguese planters in Brazil, with the assistance of Dutch capital and merchants, enormously expanded sugarcane cultivation throughout the Northeast. A typical plantation consisted of fifteen or twenty Portuguese workers and more than one hundred African and Indian slaves, a chapel, workshops, a processing plant, a casa grande (big house) for the owner and his family, and a senzala (slave quarters). The entire enterprise depended on its engenho (mill), a water- or oxen-powered grinder that used a three-roller mechanism to extract the cane's juices. By 1618 the larger mills could produce between 192,000 and 320,000 pounds of sugar annually (85.7 and 143 tons), of which they exported some 384 million pounds to Europe.

The productive capacity of Brazilian sugar plantations drew foreign invaders to Brazil: first the French fruitlessly tried to found their own colonies there, then the Dutch succeeded in capturing Brazil from 1630 to 1654. In the meantime the British and the French were themselves trying to establish a presence on other Caribbean islands and turn them into sugar factories as well. By the time the Brazilians under Mem da Sá finally drove the Dutch out of Brazil in 1654, they had lost their predominance over world markets to competition from a series of new Caribbean producers and the erection of tariff barriers in Europe, notably in France and England. Nevertheless, the lust for sugar profits resulted in the continuous populating of other Caribbean islands with masters and slaves and helped spur the settlement of areas of the present-day United States, like South Carolina.

Within a century the French and, even more so, the British became the New World's great sugar makers and exporters. Inseparably linked to this development was the emergence of the triangular trade and mercantilism in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Finished European goods were sold in Africa, where African slaves were bought and transported to the Americas for sale, and then the profits from the first two parts of the journey were used to buy American tropical commodities (especially sugar) to market in the mother country and her importing neighbors. In the eighteenth century, as the imperial relationship solidified between mother country and colony, the French and British slave-based plantations of the Caribbean reached their apogee.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought dramatic changes to the Caribbean sugar colonies. First, revolution destroyed France's most lucrative and profitable slave-based sugar economy, Haiti. Subsequently, the British moved to limit and then abolish the slave trade and slavery (1834–1838). In the wake of these developments, European demand for other sugar sources increased significantly in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Although sugarcane was planted there in the sixteenth century, Cuba was the last Caribbean island to develop its industry. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, sugar had become Cuba's main export. In the late 1820s about 1,000 sugar plantations covered some 500,000 acres, largely in the western region of the island. Investments in sugar, including the mechanization of the industry, led to spectacular increases in production and the construction of a railroad system. Before the Ten Years' War for independence (1868–1878), owners grew their own cane and milled it in their own mills. Massive destruction of property throughout the island coupled with the emancipation of the slaves, upon whom the industry had depended, led to bankruptcies and purchases by foreign investors, largely from the United States. After the war, the number of mills declined to 500 and the cultivation of sugarcane fell increasingly into the hands of Colonos, renters, or sharecroppers who depended on the mill. Some scholars have speculated that this investment played a role in U.S. involvement in Cuba's second war for independence (1895–1898) with Spain, which became the Spanish-American War. Furthermore, the production of beet sugar in Europe and the United States forced sugar prices down on the global market.

Technological innovations developed during the twentieth century led to even further mechanization and concentration within the industry: by the 1920s there were fewer than 200 mills working on the island, of which 40 to 50 percent were controlled by U.S. investors. During World War I, when Cuban sugar had to make up for losses of European beet sugar, cultivation expanded and prices skyrocketed. From the end of the war until 1920, a time known in Cuba as the Dance of the Millions, sugar reigned supreme. But then average prices per pound dropped from a high of 22.5 cents in May 1920 to a mere 3.75 cents by the end of the year, causing industry collapse and opening the door to greater U.S. takeover. Yet, the sugar industry continued to dominate Cuba throughout the first half of the twentieth century and affected all segments of its economy. By 1958, for example, it is estimated that the sugar industry alone generated one-quarter of national GNP.

After the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro believed that agrarian reform measures would finally end the island's dependence on sugar cultivation. Yet, despite efforts to diversify agriculture and industrialize, Cuba soon found itself desperately trying to harvest 10 million metric tons of sugar in 1970. Meanwhile, international agricultural conglomerates rapidly developed sugar substitutes for use in food processing and as sweeteners for the diet-conscious, thus cutting the need for sugarcane even further. Cuba, more than any other economy in the Western Hemisphere, has dramatically demonstrated the risks and rewards that come from dependency on a monocultural crop like sugar.

Since the 1990s, sugar producers have principally complained about the levels of subsidies and import quotas that the United States provides to national producers. Without these subsidies, Latin American sugar could compete in the larger U.S. market. Moreover, U.S. intransigence on this issue has caused much skepticism within Latin America over trade pacts. Latin American sugar producers, as well as other agricultural producers, fear that free trade will still be stifled. Brazil has successfully turned sugar into ethanol on a wide scale, and it is frequently used in place of gasoline, confirming the increasing importance of this crop as a bio-fuel and renewable resource.

See alsoCuban American Sugar Company; Economic Development.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bethell, Leslie, ed. Cambridge History of Latin America, vols. 1 and 2 (1984).

Bethell, Leslie. Cuba: A Short History (1993).

Knight, Franklin W. Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (1970).

Knight, Franklin W., and Colin A. Palmer, eds. The Modern Caribbean (1989).

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985).

Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. El ingenio. El complejo económico social cubano del azúcar, 3 vols. (1978).

Pérez, Louis A. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (1989).

Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1985).

Schwartz, Stuart B. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Williams, Eric Eustace. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492–1969 (1970).

Wolford, Wendy. "Of Land and Labor: Agrarian Reform on the Sugarcane Plantations of Northeast Brazil." Latin American Perspectives 31, no. 2 (March 2004): 147-170.

                                          Wade A. Kit