The Eastern Stars by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page A

starting with the Haitian revolution and continuing through the abolition of slavery in the French, British, and Danish colonies of the Caribbean, there was a move in Europe away from labor-intensive sugarcane processing, replacing it with sugar beet production. By the end of the century, more sugar from sugar beets—which grew well in Europe—was being produced than cane sugar.
    Meanwhile, the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico were maintaining a slave economy and, almost free of competition, still developing sugarcane production, which continued to increase even after the Spanish ended slavery in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. After the turn of the century, the cane sugar industry overtook the beet sugar industry. Subsequently the European sugar industry was destroyed by World War I, leaving Caribbean sugar as the only alternative. During the war, U.S. investment in the Spanish Caribbean, much of it in sugar, reached heights never seen before or since. By the end of the conflict, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic produced almost a third of all the sugar sold in the world market. Between 1913 and 1926, Dominican sugar production quadrupled. Most of that growth was under U.S. military occupation.
    In those years, sugar replaced coffee as the leading export of the Dominican Republic, a shift that had already occurred in Cuba and Puerto Rico. With this expansion, Europe, including Spain, ceased to be the primary consumer of sugar from the Spanish Caribbean, replaced by the sweet tooths of America. This switch in markets was a harbinger for the future of the Caribbean. Between the end of the American Civil War and 1890, American sugar consumption tripled. American sugar companies in mid-century were buying sugarcane and processing it in American cities. In 1870, sugar refining was the leading industry of New York City.
    Gradually it became apparent that refining the sugar where it was grown and shipping it, a far less bulky product than cane, was more cost-effective. While foreign capital brought new technology to the mills—better grinders, railroads, and electricity—the fields remained equipped with little but the muscle of the worker and the machete. Few Dominicans were available for this labor.
    While slavery continued in Puerto Rico until 1873 and in Cuba until 1886, the Dominican Republic had not had slavery since it was stopped by the Haitian occupiers in 1822. There were few Dominicans with agricultural skills looking for work, because over several generations they had settled into family farming. The Dominican Republic was a nation of small-scale farmers, and an underpopulated one at that. Estimates of the total population of the country in 1875 are as low as 150,000 people.
    But land was available, and the Dominican government charged little in export duties. By the late nineteenth century, San Pedro de Macorís became the sugar center of the Dominican Republic. Two-thirds of Dominican land planted in cane was in San Pedro. After the World War, sugar companies aggressively searched for more land. In 1923 a subsidiary of an American firm, South Porto Rico Sugar Company, burned to the ground two small villages near San Pedro—El Caimonal and Higueral—so that it could expand fields in neighboring La Romana. The company offered no compensation to the 150 families they had made homeless. To the Americans, both the sugar companies and the military, clearing peasants off land around San Pedro created not only land for planting but landless peasants in search of agricultural work. As long as peasants had land to cultivate, they were not interested in underpaid wage labor in the sugar fields: at the turn of the century, mill owners had been arguing that the Dominican Republic was unsuited for the sugar industry because the combination of underpopulation and abundant fertile land made it easy for peasants to operate small farms, so they were not interested in working for the mills.
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