In Cane’s Shadow: Commodity Plantations and the Local Agrarian Economy on Cuba’s Mid-nineteenth-Century Sugar Frontier

Abstract

So wrote the North American, Benjamin Moore, following his travels through the Cuban countryside in the 1840s.¹ Yet during the nineteenth century, this vision of Cuba’s agricultural self-sufficiency was sacrificed in favour of spreading commodity cultivation, in particular sugarcane, of which Cuba became the world’s leading producer. Sugar plantations increasingly dominated the landscape, casting an ever-longer shadow over the island’s agricultural diversity; and by the early twentieth century it seemed legitimate to claim that ‘without sugar there is no country’. In the process, the island’s environment became radically altered, such that in 1905 a Cuban agronomist remarked:

Passed… is that happy age in which with pride we could say that Cuba was the promised land, in which it was sufficient to cast the seed over the terrain in order to harvest shortly afterwards flavoursome, exquisite and abundant fruits. Cast the seed on the majority of the cultivated land …and in vain will you wait for them to produce abundant fruit.²

There is nothing in nature more enchantingly wonderful to the eye than this perpetual blending of flower and fruit, of summer and harvest, of budding brilliant youth, full of hope and promise and gaiety, and mature ripe manhood, laden with the golden treasures of hopes realized, and promises fulfilled