Sugar Cane in Cuba and its Effect on the Cuban Revolution

Source: http://www.fasttrackteaching.com/burns/Unit_6_World/Cuba_sugar_harvest_ca1900_dbloc.GIF

Sugar cane, first introduced to Cuba in the 16th century by the Spaniards, has had a detrimental effect on the island's economic development, its foreign relations, and ultimately the history of this small island nation. Upon the introduction of slavery to Cuba in 1511, nearly 800,000 African slaves supplied labor to work the large plantations. When slavery was outlawed in Cuba in 1886 as a result of a Spanish royal decree, their descendants, as well as the arrival of many Haitian and Jamaican contract laborers, continued to work the plantations, producing 1/3 of the world's sugar production by the middle of the 19th century. As a result, the United States began to invest in the sugar-based economy, quickly purchasing land and mills in the American protectorate controlling nearly half of the sugar mills in Cuba between 1916 and 1919. Because Cuba's economy was wholly dependent on sugar and because most of the sugar plantations were in the hands of US investors or wealthy upper class Cuban elites, this created structural inequalities in the Cuban population. Finally, the United States level of investment was so high which caused the Cuban sugar markets to be closely tied to the United States. Therefore, when the US decided to reverse its previous decision to eliminate trade tariffs on imported sugar in 1984, the economic effect devastated the Cuban economy and set the stage for the social and political upheavals that occurs in twentieth-century Cuba.