Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929

In this thoroughly brilliant, enormously interesting, clearly written, exhaustively researched, and thoughtfully perceptive book, Alan Dye examines one of the most important phases of the economic and political transformation of Cuba. He explains why and where Cuba developed large sugar plantations and in so doing evaluates much of the vast historiography—Cuban as well as international—that makes this period so profoundly interesting. The broad outlines of the three important decades of Cuban history ending in 1930 are quite familiar. After a destructive war for independence at the end of the nineteenth century and a short period of military occupation by the United States, Cuba emerged as a partially independent state intimately bound to its northern neighbor, both economically and politically. This extraordinary dependency facilitated the material reconstruction of the island but severely circumscribed any form of autonomy. Much of the economic reconstruction revolved around the inexorable territorial expansion and technical modernization of the sugar industry.

According to many scholars, American imperialism promoted an industry that voraciously engulfed Cuban lands, expelling would-be peasants, creating vast landed estates, and subordinating and distorting Cuban traditions and values in its insatiable quest for power and profit. This was the view espoused by the highly influential Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez in his book Azúcar y abolición en las Antillas, first published in the 1920s. Here however, Dye asks a different set of questions and arrives at a number of conclusions that sometimes complement and at other times qualify the conventional wisdom. Based primarily on the Manuel Rionda papers of the celebrated Braga Brothers Collection in the University Archives of the University of Florida at Gainesville, the annual publications of the Cuban government on the sugar business, and the very rich secondary literature, Dye recalculates the costs of sugar production and technical modernization and offers some persuasive new explanations for Cuban sugar developments and the role of the United States. While connections to the United States were important, Cuban Sugar sees the development of the modern sugar industry of the early twentieth century as the result of incremental technological innovations and the inevitable intensification of capital demands on the industry. But the Cuban changes mirrored changes in the wider industrial world in business organization and mass production. Production and prices therefore derived from worldwide market forces, not just from simple calculation in either Cuba or the United States. “The rise of mass production during Cuba's transition from colony to republic transformed the cane sugar industry. The adoption of continuous process, high-throughput technologies introduced economies of scale into milling that resulted in a huge growth in the capacities of sugar mills. The sugar enterprise passed from being the traditional self-contained plantation into a modern business that managed an enormous industrial complex and a multitude of contractual arrangements for cane supplies” (p. 254). Changes in mill size, or even in the relations between sugar manufacturers and cane growers, resulted from the higher level of technical modernization affecting the overall industry. Equally important, Dye explains why more large sugar facilities developed in eastern Cuba after 1900. The writing is clear. The technical information throughout is explained coherently, and the focus on Cuba is always made against a broader comparative context. This is certainly a major contribution to the literature, with particular appeal to specialists in Cuban and Caribbean history.