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

Epilogue

Epilogue Sugar production is practically nonexistent today in Puerto Rico. Between 1950 and 1960 the Constancia mill in Ponce, Central SanJose, Pasto Viejo in Humacao, and Centrales Rochelaise and Victoria closed. In the first half of the 1960s El Ejemplo, Guamani, Juanita, and Plazuela shut down. Centrales Canovanas, Cayey, Machete, Rio Uano, Rufina, San Vicente, Santa Juana, and Soller all closed between 1965 and 1970. Cortada,Juncos, Lafayette , Los Canos, and Monserrate closed between 1970 and 1975. The giants of the industry, which were established in the first decade after the U.S. occupation of the island and controlled much of the wealth of the insular economy for decades, collapsed in the late 1970S and 1980s. Central Fajardo of the Fajardo Sugar Company closed in 1978. Central Gu:inica, which in the first decade ofthe century had been the largest sugar mill in the world, closed in 1982. Central Aguirre, whose yearly dividends of 30 percent to its owners earned it the title of "Drake's Treasure " in the 1930S, stopped grinding in 1991.1 In Cuba, most mills were renamed after the revolution of 1959. Central Chaparra of the Cuban American Sugar Company became Jesus Menendez, after the famed Cuban labor leader. Delicias of the same company became Antonio Guiteras , the Punta Alegre was renamed Maximo Gomez, while the Boston and Preston mills of the United Fruit Company became Centrales Nicaragua and Guatemala, respectively. Central Zaza, which once belonged to a Cuban slaveowning baron, became Central BenitoJuarez, the Stewart mill was renamed Cen- EPILOGUE 249 tral Venezuela, and Central Conchita in Matanzas became the Puerto Rico Libre milI.2 In the Dominican Republic, the sugar industry has a much smaller weight in the economy than it had in the 1930S. Trujillo built the Catarey mill in 1949 and Central Rio Haina. Soon thereafter he began acquiring most of the mills in the republic.3 The majority of the mills owned by the Cuban Dominican-West India interests were acquired by the Trujillista state in the early 195os, while the properties ofthe South Porto Rico Sugar Company were acquired by Gulfand Western in 1967.4 Legacies from the period of the American Sugar Kingdom still remain. It is not difficult for an inhabitant of New York today to perceive the remnants of this world, or rather of the two poles of the plantation economy, alive and well in the archaeology of the city from which the American Sugar Kingdom was administered. Around the corner from Wall Street, 29 Front Street, from which James Howell Post once administered an immense empire ofsugar plantations in the Caribbean, is still there. The sugar refinery that initiated the National Sugar Refining Company is still in Yonkers, near the Ludlow train station. The Department ofChemistry of a prominent New York university is still called Havemeyer Hall. The other extreme of the plantation economy is equally alive in the cultural archaeology ofNew York. Every Sunday afternoon during the summer, antillanos gather together near the south shore of the 72d Street lake in Central Park to play tumbadoras, sing, and dance Cuban rumba. Bobe, a Puerto Rican musician from Brooklyn, usually starts the sessions, singing and prodding the drummers, implying that they are out ofsync and should concentrate on the clave, the wood sticks that guide the rhythmical pattern of the three drums ofAfro-Cuban rumba. With great skill he gets the drummers into sync in a rhythmical pattern from Matanzas called columbia. He starts by fusing verses from an old decima from the mountainous region of Puerto Rico with the rhythm from Matanzas: los veo desde aqui los caiiaverales y los cafetales donde yo nad ... I can see from here the canefields and the coffee fields where I was born After several decimas, Bobe is unhappy about the quality ofthe drumming, which he considers to be out ofsynchrony. With the determination ofa foreman in the cane, Bobe appeals to an old chant that mentions the Rochelaise and Igualdad mills in western Puerto Rico, prodding the drummers and surrounding public to join in the chorus and get the rumba really started. echa el molino a caminar que hay que moler en la central 250 EPILOGUE set the mill in motion we have to grind in the central A crowd ofCubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other assorted New Yorkers gathers around the drummers to answer Bobe's improvisation and repeat the chorus from central Rochelaise: "echa...