Virgin soil: The modernization of social relations on a Cuban sugar estate. The Francisco Sugar Company, 1898-1921

Technological invention and adaptation in sugar technology was stimulated in Cuba by European beet sugar competition to counter a weak market resulting from this competition. The development of larger mills and radical changes in postemancipation relations of production, characterized by the evolution of the colono system, fueled internal contradictions within Cuban society. This led to a severe economic crisis, in turn triggering a political and social crisis based on the profound social and political alienation endemic to Cuba through most of the nineteenth century. The result was the War of Cuban Independence. The destruction and disruption suffered by the sugar industry postponed further adaptation of new sugar technology and delayed the general modernization of sugar factories. Virtually the moment the war ended, however, foreign sugar capitalists such as Manuel Rionda began to establish new capital stock companies that channeled North American capital into Cuba, especially the eastern provinces. Rionda and others strove to make up for the lost time by building a number of mills of a size and technological sophistication beyond what Cuba, or the world, had yet seen. The first of these was the sugar estate Francisco.; Founded in 1899 on the wild south coast of Camaguey, Francisco encompassed approximately 46,000 acres of undisturbed jungle and rainforest. This study provides much detail regarding the making of the plantation from the financial, agricultural and manufacturing perspective. It also includes material on the natural environment and on local society.; The thesis of this work is that those sugar capitalists who participated in the first wave of investment in eastern Cuba benefitted not only from cheap land and virgin soils, but also from the opportunity to remold the relations of production. They did so by transforming the colono system, formerly characterized by independent farmers, into a system of proletarian labor. This transformation presaged a national trend in association with latifundia promoted by North American capital. The creation of a rural proletariat had profound consequences for twentieth-century Cuba.