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

6. Labor and Migration

II Labor and Migration The expansion of the sugar industry in the Spanish Caribbean in the twentieth century was so dramatic that it changed the economic balance between regions in each island, established new demographic patterns of settlement, and resulted in the settlement of lands that had hitherto remained largely depopulated. As new regions were opened up to the cultivation ofsugar, the demand for labor, particularly in the agricultural phase of the process, which was labor intensive and required dedicated labor during the zafra, propelled workers into the new plantation zones. While the sugar industry experienced expansion everywhere, the supply of labor power for the plantations varied considerably from region to region. Why were workers scarce in some regions and abundant in others? What are the historical differences between the regions? Why was the process of proletarianization more advanced in some regions than others? What is the connection between the availability oflabor power in each region and the history of the abolition of slavery? What happened to the slaves after abolition in Cuba and Puerto Rico? Did they become peasants or rural proletarians? How did the presence or absence ofan agricultural proletariat influence the patterns of immigration of workers in the different sugar-producing zones? In other words, how was the history of immigration to the plantations of the Caribbean conditioned by the previous history of rural settlement, structure oflandownership, and proletarianization in each zone? How did corporate enterprises owned by essentially the same groups of investors react to local preexisting LABOR AND MIGRATION 149 social conditions, availability oflabor power, and extent oflocal ownership of the land? Answering these questions requires looking at the interaction between the powerful corporate interests that irrupted into the Caribbean in 1898 on the one hand, and preexisting social conditions on the other, and will yield some answers to the question of how much the pattern of development was determined by preexisting class structures and not simply by external economic forces or absentee capital. In Cuba, the expansion of the plantation economy into the eastern provinces ofCamagiiey and Oriente produced new settlements and advanced concomitandy with the expansion of the railroad network of the island. By the mid-I920s, the eastern provinces caught up and surpassed the traditional western regions ofsugar cultivation in total sugar output, so that the center ofgravity ofthe sugar industry shifted to the east, away from the traditional locus of sugar cultivation inherited from the period ofslavery. The population of the eastern provinces increased at a faster pace than that of the western provinces. After 1912, the labor needs of the Cuban sugar industry, particularly in the eastern provinces, were met with immigrant labor from Jamaica, Haiti, and the British West Indies. In the Dominican Republic, the same process of expansion of the plantation economy occurred, although on a smaller scale. The existence of an entrenched peasantry with possession ofland in the context of abundance ofland and relatively low population densities blocked the emergence ofan agricultural proletariat sufficiendy large to meet the demands ofthe expanding sugar economy. As in eastern Cuba, the completion of the zafra required the yearly importation of foreign labor, which in the Dominican case was composed initially of workers from the eastern Caribbean and after World War I mosdy of Haitian workers. The island of Puerto Rico, by contrast, was more densely populated and had a surplus oflandless laborers available for work in the plantations. Even during the periods ofaccelerated expansion ofsugar production labor needs were met locally. The expanding sugar mills were unable to employ all the landless workers in the island, and laborers continued to emigrate throughout the period despite the expansion ofthe sugar industry. Historically produced differences in social structure between as well as within the islands explain the variability in the supply oflabor power. In eastern Cuba and the Dominican Republic labor power was scarce. Puerto Rico, by contrast, was at the opposite end of the spectrum, with an overabundance oflocal labor for work in the plantations. Everywhere the demand for labor was conditioned by the unchanging nature of the labor process in the harvest and the increased mechanization in the transportation sector with the introduction of portable track, tractors , and trucks. Still, the relatively uniform increased demand for labor power 150 LABOR AND MIGRATION produced by corporate capital across the islands encountered, as in the case ofthe colonos, local variations in social structure that determined the development of specific class...