Sugar and Power in the Caribbean. The South Porto Rico Sugar Company in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, 1900–1921 by Humberto García Muñiz (review)

This is an excellent business history of the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company (SPRSCO), a New York-based multinational corporation that established two of the largest and most successful sugar-producing complexes of the Americas, Guánica Centrale in Puerto Rico and Central La Romana in the Dominican Republic. With the exception of Oscar Zanetti’s book on the United Fruit Company in Cuba¹, this is the only in-depth study of a U.S.-owned sugar company in the twentieth-century Caribbean. Based on Puerto Rican historian Humberto García Muñiz’s doctoral dissertation, this is a transnational study that draws on an impressive variety of archives in the United States, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It is also comparative in that it analyzes the operations of a single company in two different settings: the protected market of colonial Puerto Rico and the ostensibly sovereign Dominican Republic that, during the period under consideration, experienced a US customs receivership and then US military occupation. Puerto Rico’s inclusion within the US tariff system created favorable conditions for the establishment of SPRSCO there and the expansion of Puerto Rican sugar production for the US internal market. In contrast, excluded from US protective tariffs and, for the most part, from US markets, the Dominican Republic sold to the world market. Yet the US played an important role in shaping the context within which both sugar economies evolved.

Sugar and Power provides useful understanding of actors and conditions in the Puerto Rican and Dominican sugar industries in the late nineteenth century, before SPRSCO appeared on the scene. It then analyzes the factors of capital, management, technology, land and labor that permitted SPRSCO’s expansion in the Caribbean. The book is impressive for its meticulous piecing together of information on the firm’s funding and the biographies of the Board of Directors and managers. The author deciphers the financial, organizational and management networks that led to the incorporation of the Company in 1900 and its operations in Puerto Rico, beginning in 1901, and the Dominican Republic from 1910 on. García Muñiz stresses the importance of German capital in New York (and German sugar brokers in Puerto Rico) in financing SPRCO, and he explores the Company’s relation to the Sugar Trust of US refiners. He insists on the importance of a new class of professionals—chemical engineers, sugar chemists, fabrication superintendents, etc., trained at Louisiana State University—who, known as Louisiana “sugar tramps,” circulated throughout the Caribbean and whose technical know-how was essential to the US multinational and most other sugar companies. Finally he shows how white Barbadans, skilled in biological technology, developed genetically improved cane varieties that boosted the productivity of the centralizing, modernizing sugar cane operations of the early twentieth century. García Muñiz also traces why and how corporate and productive structures evolved over time in response to changes in sugar regulations, the technology of sugar production, world market conditions, and the First World War.

After explaining conditions in the US that led to the formation of SPRSCO, the author traces the history of the Company in first Puerto Rico and then the DR. Established by SPRSCO in an area of plantations consolidated by Puerto Ricans in the nineteenth century, Guánica Centrale relied on the provision of sugar from colonos and a labor force of Puerto Rican migrants from the interior. Within a few years, Guánica—the largest sugar factory in Puerto Rico—outstripped its supply, so in 1910 SPRSCO determined to establish a new plantation in the DR, in the eastern province of Seibo, that would ship sugar to Puerto Rico for processing. Seibo was a frontier...