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

The development of the sugar industry remains a subject of continuing interest to historians and economists of different countries. This has much to do with the long history of the industry and its importance as a source of food and as an economic base for many countries, among them Cuba. In its passage through many different circumstances over time, the Cuban sugar industry’s changing traits affected not only the economy but also the social and political complex of the island. Such are the reasons why the subject continues to be important for those interested in Latin American history, culture, or economy.

Alan Dye is no newcomer to Cuban sugar studies, a field in which he has published valuable material since the early 1990s. The chronological framework indicated in the book’s subtitle has not prevented him from considering in the first three chapters historical facts necessary for the fuller development of his main subject in the following five chapters.

Dye has succeeded in creatively applying various methodological instruments to the analysis of the sugar industry, which, as happened with other industries at the end of the nineteenth century, was compelled to adopt organizational formulas that corresponded to the large enterprises created to deal with mass production. They had to be suited to the gigantic volumes of goods produced by such industries, and also to the increased distances entailed by market expansions.

According to Dye, the sugar industry differs from other industries affected by this process. He sees the difference in the fact that the agricultural phase of the sugar industry requires the immediate partial processing of the sugar cane once cut, a peculiarity that traditionally required the installation in situ of industrial processing units. By the end of the nineteenth century these had to be of ever increasing capacity. Added to this was the need to create a complex and carefully coordinated agricultural, industrial, and transportation infrastructure that would guarantee the efficient operation of the system.

This point of view establishes somewhat rigidly the difference between sugar and other raw materials exported from underdeveloped countries to industrialized ones. It should be taken into account that sugar, exported mainly as raw sugar by Cuba, while it is the result of a complex industrial process, is nothing but a raw material or a partially manufactured product.

While this book is rich in content and analysis, the fact that it is based solely on an internal view of the industry precludes the possibility of its taking into account certain external factors that had a deep influence on the expansion of the industry during the first decades of the twentieth century. In particular, the development of the mass production of sugar became a growth factor inversely proportional to the possibilities of agricultural diversification in Third World countries and to the use of other industrial options, accumulating a heavy economic burden for most cane sugar producing nations. Whether they were mechanisms voluntarily demanded by the sugar and tobacco producers in Cuba or rules induced by American interests, there can be no doubt that the reciprocity instruments that were applied to trade relations between Cuba and the United States created fundamental limitations to the development of the island’s sugar industry, which made it essentially a supplier of “raws” to the American refining industry. While this was a problem inherited from colonial times, the Reciprocity Treaty of 1903 institutionalized the complementary functions of the Cuban sugar industry in relation to the refineries in the United States.

Despite these limitations, Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production will contribute markedly to a better knowledge of the Cuban sugar industry during the first three decades of this century. Its contributions are not limited to the incorporation of new and systematized information on the Cuban case, however valuable that...