by James Walvin
In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Cuba became the world’s largest sugar producer. When slavery there was abolished in 1886, the island was producing 750,000 tons of sugar, representing around 40 per cent of the world’s exports. And it did so with finance from Spain, the USA and Britain, and using modern equipment shipped across the Atlantic from British heavy-engineering companies. But behind this story of Cuban sugar lay the rising power of the USA. It had sustained Cuban slavery by shipping in Africans on American ships, it invested heavily in Cuban plantations, and the US bought much of the island’s sugar exports. Now, after 1886, Cuban sugar planters faced the problem that had confronted earlier planters elsewhere in the Caribbean – how to run sugar plantations without slaves?
In the years after the abolition of slavery, Cuban sugar came to dominate Cuban agriculture. It greatly surpassed the output of local coffee, with Brazilian coffee now dominating world markets, i.e. mainly the USA. By the turn of the century, Cuba was producing more than 1 million tons of sugar, most of which went to the USA – not surprisingly, since most of Cuba’s sugar industry was owned, controlled, directed or managed by US and joint US–Cuban interests. (In 1885, for instance, some 250 skilled men from Boston alone worked on Cuban estates.) The link was simple, as the US Consul in Havana admitted: ‘De facto, Cuba is already inside the commercial union of the United States.’ The American Sugar Refining Company (the Sugar Trust), which refined 70–80 per cent of America’s sugar, owned nineteen refineries in Cuba. It wielded enormous economic and political power in Havana and Washington, and played a critical role before and after the 1898 Spanish-American War, ensuring that Cuba remained securely within the gravitational pull of Uncle Sam.22
Cuba was Uncle Sam’s tropical backyard. It helped to feed the US demand for sugar, and forged that special relationship so defended by the US, yet so disliked by Cubans, and which became central to the spiky and often belligerent relations between the two countries from that day to this. At the heart of this persistent rumbling discord lay the matter of sugar.
The US interest in Caribbean sugar extended far beyond Cuba. The three Spanish islands of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and especially Cuba provided rich pickings for US interests. Via an astonishing and unprecedented drive to convert ever more land and labour to sugar cultivation, they were producing 1.3 million tons by 1902, before doubling it again by 1920. Three years later, their output had risen to an astonishing 6.75 million tons.23
Worldwide sugar prices rose steeply in the early years of the twentieth century and, as a result, the old sugar regions expanded, and new regions rushed into sugar production: Mauritania, Brazil, Argentina and India, for example. The American appetite for sugar was now sated by imports from Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and, above all, Cuba. All this in addition to the home-made sugar from Louisiana and from the sugar-beet industry in the US Midwest, and from Germany. But a reliance on imports remained vulnerable to disruption. Just how vulnerable was starkly illustrated by the outbreak of the First World War.
America’s ability to produce enormous volumes of foodstuffs proved vital in the First World War, but wartime losses of shipping threatened food supplies on both sides of the Atlantic. America’s imports of beet sugar from Germany simply dried up and it was clear that the market needed more sugar from the Caribbean. But it soon became apparent that the USA also needed to ration key food items and to persuade Americans to change their eating habits. Sugar was an obvious target and the US Government set out to persuade people to consume less sugar, especially when the USA entered the war in 1917. Sugar was now required to supply the US military and allies in Europe.24
The Food Administration, given the task of handling the problem, focused on wheat, meat, fats – and sugar. There was a pressing need to reduce America’s per capita consumption of sugar (currently running at 90lb), and hotels, clubs, restaurants and stores were all instructed to reduce the volumes of sugar in their fare. Manufacturers of candies, soft drinks, chewing gum and ice cream – all were expected to reduce their sugar contents.25
One outcome of wartime restrictions was an agreement between the US Government and US sugar refiners to create a monopoly in sugar buying, with a joint US–European committee deciding how best to divide up sugar between the US and her European allies. To many Americans, the resulting sugar rationing, and the constant prompting to be self-denying and parsimonious in sugar consumption, smacked too much of government interference in people’s private lives. The altruism of such pleas (for example, that the volumes of sugar used to manufacture US candies was enough to cover the entire sugar consumption of Britain and France) did not please or satisfy everyone. Major sugar refiners were equally quick to bridle at government controls. The result was a widespread unpopularity of ‘big business’ (which had its roots in the anti-trust mood of a generation earlier). The Sugar Trust was especially disliked; it seemed more concerned for its profits than about national interest, or low prices for the American consumer.
America’s wartime sugar policy focused on luxury items – candies, chocolates, ice creams – although exceptions were made to encourage home preservation of foods and fruits, by allowing extra sugar.26 By the summer of 1918, however, the war had created severe sugar shortages. Millions of pounds of sugar had been sunk by German submarines, and President Wilson authorised the establishment of a sugar corporation, empowered to import sugar and control the profits on the handling and sale of sugar. Restrictions were placed on the use of sugar in public and even in the home. Consumers were now limited to one ounce a day, with certificates introduced to control and monitor the whole process. Rationing was tightened and newspapers were recruited to keep up the pressure with exhortations to reduce consumption: ‘SEVEN WAYS FOR DAILY SUGAR SAVING’. Open sugar bowls were banned in restaurants. Despite the difficulties and criticisms, the system worked. Americans had been asked to save 600,000 tons of sugar. In the event, they saved 775,000 tons.27
America’s problem with sugar in wartime was only the latest example of a story that had been familiar for the past three centuries. Sugar, produced primarily in distant tropical places, had become an everyday necessity in the lives of millions. But it was vulnerable to threat of disruption in wartime. To keep supplies moving, and to keep prices acceptable to consumers, government was forced to intervene and, in 1917, as in the eighteenth century, sugar was a hotly contested issue. It had so intruded into the diet of millions of people that life was unimaginable without it. Sugar was essential – and it was everywhere. If it was scarce or costly, politicians and governments were called to account.
The high sugar prices in wartime were bound to fade in peacetime, and although they held up at first, by the mid-1920s they began to fall steeply. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, economic and social discord abounded. In Cuba, the impact of the crash on the dominant sugar industry was catastrophic, with unrest, revolution and the physical takeover of American-owned sugar plantations and mills. US sugar growers – powerful in Washington – demanded, and got, tariffs on cheap, imported sugar to protect them from Cuban sugar. FDR, President from 1933, worrying about the very real danger of upheaval in Cuba, produced a compromise – an equal quota in the US market for both US sugar and for imported foreign sugar, with Cuba granted 64 per cent of the foreign quota. The Sugar Act of 1937, which remained in place until 1974, ‘made sugar the most regimented of all American crops’.28
On the eve of the Second World War, sugar had become a remarkably regulated and controlled commodity in the USA. Within a generation, sugar had seduced the US Government to involve itself in the most intimate and detailed matters of the sugar industry. In living memory, sugar had been at the heart of US foreign (and military) politics in the Caribbean and Pacific, and had been critical in pushing the US Government into detailed intervention in the economy. What underpinned this entire story was the American consumers’ attachment to sweet food and drink. Americans like to use the phrase as American as apple pie
’. That pie needed plenty of sugar to make it tasty.
No one doubted that sugar was a necessity of life . . .’ in the USA.29 Moreover, much of it came from Cuba and, after 1945, that island enjoyed a lavish quota in the US market. All this was thrown into confusion by the Cuban revolution of 1958. Fidel Castro set about tackling the US-dominated sugar industry on the island. He confiscated sugar estates of more than 1,000 acres and banned foreigners from owning Cuban land. The US Congress promptly slashed Cuba’s sugar quota, and Cuba turned to new trading partners in Russia and Eastern Europe. When President Kennedy banned all trade with Cuba, the USA immediately lost half of its sugar supplies. Faced by this enormous shortage, Congress promptly granted Cuba’s sugar quota to American producers, lifting the 26-year-old restrictions on US sugar-cane production. Quite simply, American growers were given ‘the green light to plant as much sugar as they could grow’.30
In one state in particular, the prospects were too tempting to resist. Major agribusinesses swooped on the most obvious location – Florida – for an expansion of sugar cultivation. Florida already had a fledgling sugar industry. It had produced a mere 29,000 tons in 1934, which increased to 175,000 by the 1950s. Compare that, however, to Cuba’s mighty output which was in the millions of tons. The centre of Florida’s sugar industry, the small town of Clewiston – ‘America’s Sweetest Town’ – now became the focus for a massive expansion into surrounding sugar fields. New sugar lands, however, required heavy investment both in land and in machinery. Factories which cost millions of dollars to build also required a steady flow of sugar cane to function smoothly. Many Florida agriculturists specialising in other types of produce – fruit, vegetables, cattle – transformed themselves into sugar planters, and new co-operatives of sugar growers sprang up, producing more and more sugar for the American market.
The most important newcomers to the post-1958 Florida sugar boom were exiled sugar planters from Cuba, some with vast, lucrative sugar businesses and family possessions in Cuba seized by Castro. In Florida, they picked up where they had left off in Cuba, buying land, machinery and investing heavily in establishing what was, effectively, a new sugar industry. By the 1990s, they had more than 190,000 acres in sugar cane. Cubans built eight major factories and employed legions of émigré Cuban workers. Americans with experience of Caribbean sugar – and with access to US finance and a desire to oust Castro – also joined in this Florida ‘sugar rush’. By the end of the twentieth century, the US Sugar Corporation in Clewiston was producing 700,000 tons of sugar annually. This rush into sugar, however, had serious and complex consequences for the Florida Everglades which bordered their sugar lands.31
In the space of thirty years, yet another new breed of sugar baron had emerged. They, too, were wealthy beyond imagination, controlled huge landholdings in Florida and the Caribbean, and they owned highly modernised factories disgorging large volumes of sugar for the US market – all at a price guaranteed by the US Government. Florida’s sugar men were also very well placed, with friends in high places in Washington on whom they lavished costly hospitality and financial help in elections.
The consequences for the state of Florida were enormous. In 1955, the state had 36,000 acres turned over to sugar cane; by 1973, that had risen to 276,000 acres. Florida’s sugar output of 173,000 tons in 1953 had grown to almost 1 million tons by the mid-1960s. And the inevitable dark side to this story? It was yet another dismal chapter in the history of sugar, with the Florida sugar industry needing plenty of field labour. And that meant temporary migrant labour, especially from Mexico and the Caribbean. To many, it looked uncomfortably like a new slave trade.32
Migrant labour became a global phenomenon in the twentieth century, and US agriculture became particularly reliant on it. Its immediate origins lay in the Second World War and, in a string of agreements between the US and Mexican and British governments to provide labour for the USA, Mexicans arrived by train and by bus, Bahamians and Jamaicans were shipped, and later were flown in, and the patterns continued in peacetime. By the mid-1960s, half a million Mexicans a year were travelling to the USA to work in agriculture. In the same period, upwards of 20,000 guest workers – mainly West Indians – arrived to cut Florida’s sugar cane for 5–6 months each year.33 On the sugar estates, their living and working conditions were dire – bunks in barracks, unventilated buildings, poor sanitation and almost non-existent healthcare. Their employers spun a fine web of propaganda about the facilities, promoting a benign image of life and work in the Florida sugar industry. One film intoned: ‘To watch a West Indian wield a cane knife is to see a centuries old art.’34 This risible remark overlooked the obvious fact that it was an art fashioned by slavery and indentured labour.
The sugar estates tried to shield their employees from outside scrutiny, but investigative journalists were quick to expose the realities, both of the workers’ plight and the ecological degradation wrought by the expansion of the sugar land on to the Everglades. Sugar’s exhaustive use of scarce water supplies, and the poisonous run-offs of waste and chemicals into the natural habitat, created serious damage.35
The need to preserve the Everglades had been obvious in the early years of the twentieth century, although the area was not designated a National Park until 1947. Urban growth and industrial development had profound effects by mid-century, although most damaging of all was the expansion of sugar cultivation. Once again, sugar seemed to be the catalyst for the degradation of a precious national habitat, and prompted an environmentalist (eventually a political) movement to return the sugar lands back to their natural state. At the time of writing, negotiations for the state to buy back the sugar lands for $1.7 billion have stalled.
Within a generation, prompted by a revolution in Cuba and by the survival of a protected US sugar market (put in place in wartime), Florida’s sugar industry had emerged, alongside tourism, as one of the state’s major industries. The consequences for labour, and for the delicate ecosystem of the Florida Everglades, were enormous. Sugar was, yet again, living up to its reputation as a threat to its natural habitat, an employer on inhuman terms and – as we shall see – a product with catastrophic consequences for the health of its consumers.
The recent story of sugar in Florida was, in many respects, an updated version of the history of European colonial sugar two centuries earlier. Sugar cultivation had transformed the ecologies of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, and threatened to do the same in the Florida Everglades in the late twentieth century. Although clearly not on a comparative level with slavery, Florida’s sugar industry also generated a wretched story of labour exploitation – it was brutal, callous and degrading. The conditions of transient workers in Florida’s cane fields prompted a string of legal cases. Importing migrant labour was a good way of circumventing local labour laws; migrants could be moved on at the first sign of discontent or complaint. In the worst cases, in the 1980s, police were used to break up – and beat up – striking workers, before dispatching them back to their homelands.
Yet at the same time, astonishing wealth was generated by the system. The twentieth-century Florida sugar planters lived in a style, and boasted wealth and assets, that would have shamed the sugar barons of the eighteenth century. Equally, the wealth of Florida’s major sugar barons enabled them to court, and be courted by, politicians. Two hundred years earlier, planters, like Indian nabobs, had exercised political influence in their homelands in defence of their sugar interests. So, too, the barons of Florida. They became important players in American politics, both at regional and state level. Not surprisingly, the ecologists’ efforts to curb the dangers posed to the Everglades faced enormous political obstacles. They still do. Although the rise of the modern environmentalist movement has opened the public’s eyes to the damage caused by the intrusion of sugar – as well as urban development – into the Everglades, their efforts have only partially succeeded. As with the wider story of sugar itself, those who have the most to profit from sugar – the peopl
e who cultivate, process and market it – show few signs of easing up in their drive to ever-greater production.
Throughout the twentieth century, American governments of all persuasions had taken a keen interest in sugar. But why was this so? What was so special about sugar that prompted governmental interest and intervention? To an outsider, it seems odd that this one tropical commodity should become a matter of sensitive political and even strategic concern. Yet this had been the case with Europe’s sugar economy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. And it was true of the USA in the twentieth century.
From the early days of the Republic, the US Government had played a critical role in the story of sugar in the USA. In the century between 1789 and 1891, the USA levied a tariff on imported sugar to raise revenue for the Treasury. Import duties provided two thirds of US Government income in the nineteenth century, and sugar duties made up a hefty 20 per cent of those duties. Higher duties on imported refined sugar protected US sugar refiners, while tariffs on raw sugar were designed to protect US cane growers. After 1890, new tariffs had the desired effect of stimulating the expansion of the US domestic sugar industry. Thereafter, Cuban sugar poured into the refineries on the east coast of the USA and sugar (and its tariffs) entered the bloodstream of US politics, law, and even of global politics. America’s sugar politics had major consequences on the economic and political stability of Hawaii and Cuba, in both places bringing about conflict and the eventual imposition of direct American control. Clearly, the diplomatic and economic turbulence which led to war in 1898 was a complex brew. But sugar was a decisive element in that mix.