American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (review)

How did U.S. military and economic power combine to transform the social and economic structure of the Spanish Caribbean after 1898? This is the principal question posed by César Ayala's comparative study of the rise of the modern sugar exporting economies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the decades immediately following the Spanish-American War. Rejecting the Plantation School's emphasis on long historical continuities, Ayala argues that the Spanish Caribbean was the setting for a radical social and economic transformation driven largely by corporate interests in the United States. The result was "a new form of underdevelopment . . . based on capitalist relations of production" (p. 2) imposed by large and powerful banking and sugar refining corporations in the United States. It is this focus on the relationship between interlocking corporate structures in the United States and ways in which these corporations organized sugar production in the Spanish Caribbean that sets Ayala's broadly comparative work apart from the many other studies of sugar production in the Caribbean which are more narrowly focused. In successive chapters that describe and analyze the corporate organization of the sugar refining industry and the political economy of sugar in the United States as well as land tenure and labor systems in the Caribbean, Ayala shrewdly illustrates the whole and complex sets of political and economic relationships between the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic that, taken together, constituted an American Sugar Kingdom.

On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898 the largest U.S. sugar refiners had already formed holding companies to create an oligopoly in sugar (horizontal corporate integration) that mirrored those of other sectors such as petroleum, steel, and copper. These sugar refiners would become the principal beneficiaries of U.S. military and political expansion in the Caribbean. The sugar tariff in the United States was intended to benefit both domestic sugar producers and sugar refiners and, in fact, encouraged the latter to control the production of raw sugar (vertical integration) which in turn profoundly affected the way in which sugar was cultivated and processed in the Spanish Caribbean. Documenting a "quick transition to capitalist agriculture" (p. 146), Ayala makes a convincing case for historical discontinuity, as unfree labor systems were supplanted by wage labor managed by modern business corporations. Unlike the U.S. South after the Civil War, where the transition from slavery was slow and incomplete and where sharecropping and debt peonage provided much of the labor resources used to cultivate and harvest cotton, sharecropping and peonage in sugar were insignificant in the Spanish Caribbean after 1898. Instead, a local entrepreneurial class of cane farmers, both large and small, used wage labor and family labor to produce most of the cane grown in eastern Cuba and Puerto Rico. In the Dominican Republic and western Cuba, large corporate farms employing both resident and foreign wage laborers produced a larger share of cane delivered to the sugar refineries. The abrupt collapse of sugar prices in the Great Depression of the 1930s produced widespread economic misery in the Spanish Caribbean and provoked a revolution in Cuba, but it did not undermine U.S. corporate economic hegemony in the region. Instead, it resulted in an increased vertical integration as U.S. banking interests acquired more sugar properties and expanded their already dominant role in the management of the American Sugar Kingdom.

Based on extensive primary and secondary source materials, Ayala has produced an accessible study of sugar in the Spanish Caribbean that will appeal to a broad audience of readers ranging from advanced undergraduates to economists, political scientists, and area specialists. Useful tables and clear, concise maps as well as detailed endnotes and an ample bibliography make this...