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Azucar!

“Annexationists prophesied a time when, with Cuba under our flag, we would control the world’s supply of sugar as absolutely as we did cotton.”
- Leland Hamilton Jenks, OUR CUBAN COLONY, A STUDY IN SUGAR, 1928

"The sugar industry-always a parasitical growth-has never been able to pay its expenses with its own resources in normal times. It depended on slavery for its prosperity in former times and now the masked slavery of the West Indian laborers is unable to save it. Some sort of economic euthanasia is needed for industries which have developed into monstrosities as is the case with Cuba's sugar industry."
- Herminio Portell Vilá, Hispanic American Historical Review, 1932

“Our citizens have invested over a billion dollars in Cuba, and own more than three-fourths of the enourmous sugar industry of the Island.”
- Dewin G. Nourse, Institute of Econics, 1932 / Director's Preface to THE CUBAN SITUATIONAND OUR TREATY RELATIONS by Philip G. Wright

“Most of the American-owned Cuban land was not held by homesteaders but by large corporations or small groups of wealthy men. Absentee land ownership was the commonmethod of United States agricultural investment.”
- James H. Hitchman / Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), 90-106

The Meaning of Cuban Sugar
Part 1 of 2

Cuban Sugar: Sidebars

Cane and the Cuban Soil

Cuba's Agricultural Seasons
An excerpt from Rural Cuba by Lowry Nelson

What is the Colono System?
An excerpt from Our Cuban Colony: A Study in Sugar by Leland Hamilton Jenks