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  • Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929
  • Allen Wells
Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929. By Allen Dye. (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 343 pp. $55.00.

This well-crafted and impressive econometric study of the Cuban cane-sugar industry during the decades after the Spanish-Cuban-American war, argues that technology, not yanqui imperialism and North American capital, was the main driver of the island’s sugar economy. Cuban Sugar not only has an excellent grasp of the relevant secondary literature, sustains its principal arguments by mining a raft of sugar-company records and Cuban government publications, makes thoughtful comparisons [End Page 559] with Cuba’s principal cane competitors—Hawaii and Java—but it is gracefully written, despite its reliance on cliometric methodology.

Cuban Sugar is, however, not written dispassionately. Dye has an agenda. He seeks to correct the widely held belief in the literature that heavily capitalized North American companies acted like predators in the wake of 1898, driving out Cuban-owned mills and thereby ensuring the island’s reliance on the U.S. market. Rather, the author contends that changes in the international sugar market, especially competition from subsidized European beet-sugar growers; the idiosyncratic character of cane-sugar production and the island’s land, labor, and infrastructural endowments; and, above all, the persistent introduction of new mass-production technology best account for the evolution of the sugar economy during the first three decades of the twentieth century. North American and Cuban sugar interests are portrayed as rational actors; politics is excised from the mathematical and analytical equations. Dye’s thesis, sustained largely by both macro- and microeconomic data, is that technically driven economies of scale, a quintessential Schumpeterian process of creative destruction, were the relentless agents of change in the sugar industry.1

Tracing the development of the sugar mill, Dye chronicles how a technological revolution forced sugar producers to either innovate or perish. As the number of mills fell from 1,190 in 1877 to 163 in 1929, the size of the sugar crop increased from a half a million to five million tons. Prodigious factories in the field (centrales) altered the layout of cane fields, private and public railways, energy needs, and labor and land tenure arrangements. Moreover, mass-production technology demanded new lands and sources of labor. A typical mill owned 3,000 acres in 1878; by the 1920s, centrales owned, leased, or controlled from 100,000 to 200,000 acres of land. North American sugar investors, like the United Fruit Company, moved into the eastern provinces with abandon, displacing subsistence producers in their wake. Large portions of these lands were contracted to growers (colonos), who provided the cane for the insatiable centrales.

A brief review cannot do this monograph justice. It contains trenchant discussions of why older Cuban (yet few North American) mills found it preferable to continue to use outmoded technology rather than invest in the latest machinery (vintage capital effect); of the formidable adjustment costs associated with the acquisition of new plant and equipment, which mandated a gradual adoption of mass-production techniques by the most flush North American firms; and of how balky colonos resisted sugar mills—what Dye calls “the holdup effect”—by taking their crop elsewhere (here the evidence is disconcertingly thin).

Despite the impressive methodological apparatus and the author’s command of the subject, Dye’s conclusions are difficult to accept. It is [End Page 560] ironic that Cuban Sugar’s fascinating characterization of the technological changes in the sugar industry, which seeks to refute leftist claims of North American imperialism, reads like so many pages out of Karl Marx’s stinging rebuke of rapacious bourgeois entrepreneurs who adopt the latest technological innovations in Das Capital. (In fact, Dye eclectically draws on Marxist scholars, like Moreno Fraginals and Iglesias García in his superb historical introduction to this study).2 By refusing to consider political factors and power relations, by downplaying the critical importance of securing credit for sugar company and colono alike, by arguing stridently that innovation and mass-production...

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