A Brief Historiography of US Hegemony in the Cuban sugar industry

 

The premise for the US takeover of Cuba’s sugar business begins in the late 1890’s at the close of the war for Cuban independence from Spain. Its product, the Treaty of Paris, was signed in December of 1889 by Spain, transferring the jurisdiction of Cuba to the USA. This is where the door to Cuba’s untapped agribusiness potential was opened, eventually leading to the US’s exploitation and moulding of the sugar industry to become Cuba’s economic foundation.

Cuba’s climate and topography are ideal for the production of sugarcane, making it an ideal location for mass crop production. The US capitalized on Cuba’s war-torn and vulnerable state to buy up cheap land and force people from their properties to install sugar monocropping and mills. The spread of these sugar plantations, or latifundios, destroyed peasant and farmer communities across rural Cuba. Since the technology used by existing small farmers in Cuba was unfit to meet the needs of large scale monoculture production, farmers were either bought out to produce sugar, or were pushed out to more mountainous, less fertile land. This led them to shift their crop production to varities able to handle the steeper land such as coffee and cocoa, causing erosion to these mountainous areas over time. The amount of small independent farmers was halved. Those who stayed on the sugar land were tenants, or colonos, working for corporations. These farmers had to rely on the mills for their livelihood in an unpredictable, single-crop dependent economy.

The need for physical laborers, or zafras,  dramatically increased with the implementation of these farms. A surge of non-white immigrants from the Caribbean arrived, sparking the Cuban white elite to rally for a ban on non-white immigration. This resulted in 1910’s Military Order No. 155, granting a $5 stipend for every white immigrant from Panama. Eventually, the demand for labor was so intense that the resistance on non-whites in Cuba was overtaken by need. This resulted in changes in Cuba’s racial demographics that last today.

Financially, export oriented monoculture farming is risky business, especially for the farmers who produce the crop. Cuba’s economy became solely dependant on foreign capital from sugar exports and the global sugar price. The US was able to majorly profit from their sugar hegemony due to control over “Favorable Trade Agreements”.  These arrangements included policies such as 1903’s Reciprocity Treaty, lowering tariffs on goods exchanged exclusively between the US and Cuba (Specifically Cuban exports to the US). This resulted in little financial gain for Cuban growers, and was created for US financial gain.

The problems that the US introduced to Cubans through their domination of the sugar industry set a stage palatable for the revolutionary movement led by figures such as Fidel Castro. The frustration Cuban farmers and citizens felt aligned well with Castro’s anti US sentiments. The timeline of the US takeover of Cuban affairs is among abundant examples of the frontier expansion mentality taken by the states. The ideas that Cubans were unable to control their own affairs without US intervention, and that its land wouldn’t be exercised to its full potential without the hand of the states are reminiscent of the motivations behind many of their conquerings and overtakings across Latin America. Although the Cuban sugar boom brought in large amounts of capital and modernization to Cuba, the means required to achieve this status resulted in the destruction of Cuban infrastructure, land, and the traditional farming class. The consequences from riskiest parts of this means of profit fell onto Cubans, and the benefits fell mainly on the US. Depending on which national perspective is taken, these outcomes can be seen as necessary evils for a developing nation’s advancement, or the evil truth of imperialistic gain. Regardless, the Cuban sugar boom was a monumentally transformational time in Cuban history, modernization, and economic development. Its effects, negative and positive, are still felt  today.

 

McCollum, Justin. (2011). “A Brief Historiography of US Hegemony in the Cuban Sugar Industry,” The Forum: Journal of History: Vol 3. Iss 1, Article 8. Retrieved from

http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=forum