Cuban Sugar Research Articles

Her Revolution, Her Life

Margaret Randall, Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 248 pages, $23.95, paperback.In the early 1950s, Haydée Santamaría Cuadrado moved from a rural Cuban sugar plantation to Havana, to live with her younger brother Abel. Together, they would help to establish a revolutionary movement that would change the history of their country. Haydée, as she is known throughout Cuba—Yeyé to her friends—was one of only two women among 160 men who took part in attacks on Batista's army barracks at Moncada and Bayamo on July 26, 1953, which sparked the Cuban Revolution.… In her recent book, poet and scholar Margaret Randall, who lived in Cuba in the 1970s and became friends with Haydée, has captured the essence of this exemplary woman.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

A Comparison of Various Technological Options for Improving Energy and Water Use Efficiency in a Traditional Sugar Mill

This study is a comparison of four technological improvements proposed in previous works for the Cuban sugar mill Carlos Baliño. These technological options are: (1) utilization of excess wastewater for enhanced imbibition; (2) utilization of waste heat for thermally driven cooling; (3) utilization of excess bagasse for pellets; and (4) modification of the cogeneration unit for maximum electric power generation. The method used for the evaluation of the technological options involves using criteria such as energy saving, financial gains, and CO2 emission saving potential. The results of the analysis show that the first three technological improvement options are attractive only during the crushing season. On the other hand, the last technological improvement option can be attractive if a year round generation of surplus power is sought. The first technological improvement option leads to only minor changes in energy utilization, but the increase in sugar yield of 8.7% leads to attractive profitability with an extremely low payback period. The CO2 emissions saved due to the fourth technological improvement option are the highest (22,000 tonnes/year) and the cost of CO2 emissions saved for the third technological improvement option (lowest) amount to 41 USD/tonne of CO2 emissions saved. The cycle efficiencies of the third and fourth technological improvement options are 37.9% and 36.8%, respectively, with payback periods of 2.3 and 1.6 years. The second technological improvement option is the least attractive alternative of the group.

Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas

With this collection of eight essays (plus an introduction and coda), the editors Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth seek to reconceptualize the slave narrative genre in multiple ways—by extending its periodization back to the early eighteenth century, incorporating transnational and transcultural narratives, and including texts not actually written by enslaved people. Aljoe and Finseth make a compelling case to expand the traditional slave narrative canon to include lesser-known works that do not always adhere strictly to convention. Those narratives reveal meaningful experiences among black actors and authors operating within the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The essays in this volume demonstrate that in this time period individuals of African descent could assume a host of identities over their lifetimes, often due to voluntary or involuntary transnational geographic movement. The cohort of black men that José Guadalupe Ortega discusses shifted from slaves terrorized by Bahamian masters to critical agents in the transformation of the Cuban sugar economy to litigants who used Spanish law to gain their freedom. As Keith Michael Green highlights, Briton Hammon maintained multiple identities representing various states of unfreedom common in the Americas during the eighteenth century—slavery, naval impressment, captivity by American Indians, incarceration, and indentured servitude. The collection reveals a population of black men who were intensely mobile, shifting from one culture, one form of captivity, or one economic state to another, sometimes multiple times during their lives.

Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution

Ferrer, Ada. Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and in the Age of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 384 pp.More than ten years in the making, Ada Ferrer's Freedom's Mirror examines the interplay between the Haitian Revolution and Cuba from the time of the Revolution's outbreak in 1791 the aftermath of Haiti's 1804 independence. Though detailed descriptions and analyses of sources occasionally weigh down the narrative (the description of a single document occupies 25 pages, 299-324), Ferrer's work is based on impressive multi-archival work in Cuba, Spain, and France and it will prove invaluable specialists of abolitionism and colonialism in the Caribbean and beyond. Her conclusions are nuanced: though the Haitian slave revolt provided a powerful counter-example the dominant slave-holding paradigm of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the period also saw the economic take-off of a Cuban sugar economy based on slave labour.The traditional view that the Haitian Revolution left every white planter in the Americas shivering in fear of a second seems well on its way being debunked. Ashli White has shown in Encountering Revolution (2010) that many US slave owners were confident that no similar outbreak could take place in the United States of America. Ferrer adds that Cuban planters viewed the 1791 slave revolt in French SaintDomingue (Haiti) not only as a threat but also a business opportunity. Eager replace the beleaguered French colony as the Caribbean's leading exporter of sugar, they hoped to emulate Saint-Domingue but contain Haiti (p. 38). Cuban booster Francisco Arango y Parreno was in Spain negotiating for looser slave-trading rules when the 1791 slave revolt occurred. News of the event, far from scaring him, prompted him double-down on his plan replace Saint-Domingue as the Caribbean's sugar juggernaut. The hour of our happiness has arrived, he exclaimed (p. 4).Ferrer also spends much time discussing the ways in which news of the Haitian Revolution was disseminated among Cuban slaves, whether in print, orally, or through commercial exchanges. Some historians have debated whether slaves knew much about the Haitian Revolution because of widespread illiteracy and official censorship, but Ferrer convincingly argues that the black population was well aware of events in Saint-Domingue, though not always accurately because wild rumours circulated as freely as truthful ones. Because Cuba continued import slaves from Saint-Domingue throughout the 1790s despite official bans and the obvious security risk, many negros franceses (French blacks) who had personally experienced the great slave revolt in SaintDomingue lived and toiled in Cuba, where they could inform their brethren of the momentous events that had taken place in SaintDomingue.The middle part of the book is equally well researched but less informative because other scholars covered similar ground in the time it took for Ferrer complete her study. Spain's use of black auxiliaries during its invasion of Saint-Domingue in 1793-1795 was already the subject of Jane Landers' Atlantic Creoles (2010). …

Consuming Slavery?

Introductionalong one of Santiago de Cuba's busier avenues lies a restaurant that is at once ordinary and extraordinary As is the case with many restaurants in Cuba's second city, the front doors remain open during business hours, and above them, painted on the facade, appears the name of the restaurant. It is not long, however, before we gain a glimpse into the restaurant's extraordinary qualities. On either side of the front doors is a life-sized statue: on one side, a man, and on the other, a woman, both of a dark copper hue. In their physical appearance, the man and woman seem Afro-Cuban; in addition, they are dressed in simple garb, like fieldworkers. These statues are, in fact, representations of enslaved Afro-Cubans.This essay examines the racial, historical and ideological nuances of this particular restaurant, El Barracon, in operation in Santiago since 2008. Established through an initiative of Cuba's Ministry ofTourism, the restaurant seeks to introduce its patrons (foreign tourists, primarily) to specific features of the island's nineteenth-century, colonial period: specifically, the era of slavery. El Barracon, in short, is an imaginative, consumer-oriented and profit-driven recreation of life in a barracon (barracoon), or slave barracks. The physical structure of the restaurant is meant to resemble such a slave barracks; the Afro-Cuban staff is dressed in period costumes; and the artwork and decorations similarly depict the activities of enslaved persons on a nineteenth-century Cuban sugar plantation, or ingenio. My aims in the essay are, on the one hand, comparative and interpretive, in that they entail reflections on my own visit to the restaurant in 2010: as I ate the restaurant's ajiaco, I could only speculate on the improbability of a similar, slavery-themed restaurant being established in the United States, where I live. Indeed, tourist-driven establishments in the United States do not depict and memorialise the era of slavery in ways that approximate the directness and nonchalance of El Barracon. Part of my objective is to outline in general terms and in a comparative context (as opposed to, for example, an anthropological ethnographical approach that lies outside my disciplinary training) these variable, nation-specific approaches to the memorialisation of slavery (in terms, primarily, of the United States and Cuba). On the other hand, my larger aim here is to seek answers to the following questions: How, within a Cuban cultural and historical context, is a place like El Barracon possible in the first place, and how is it capable of receiving official federal sanction? Furthermore, what does an analysis of El Barracon contribute to an understanding of how Cuban culture, broadly stated, and Afro-Cubanness, more specifically, are understood at present on the island?Comparative memorialisations of slaverySlavery has occurred in numerous societies around the world and across multiple historical epochs; furthermore, slavery is a term applied to varying kinds of forced labour that can differ sharply in many ways, including degrees of brutality Similarly, the ways different societies choose to historicise and memorialise slavery can vary dramatically Given the profoundly adverse effects slavery has on a society that sanctions it, it is no surprise that, in general terms, the ways in which slavery is memorialised has posed difficulties for societies with slavery in their past. In the United States, for instance, there is nothing resembling an agreedupon approach toward the memorialisation of what has commonly been referred to in that country as the 'peculiar institution of slavery. If there has been an overall historical tendency, it has been in the direction of silence and neglect. Documented organised tours of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1998 and 2000, for instance, contained very little information about enslavement. These tours followed the traditional focus on architecture, famous white men and their family lives, and politics. …

Philip A. Howard.Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry.

Philip A. Howard.Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry.

Women on the Move: Reinterpreting Haitian Migration to Cuba through an Analysis of the Bahamas

Of the many legacies of the first US occupation of Haiti, migration has been paramount in shaping economic development and cultural transformation. In giving rise to mass migration among the peasantry, the US occupation instituted migration as a livelihood option for Haitians. The large majority of Haitian migrants went to Cuba. Since Haitian men traditionally harvested sugar and, accordingly, were recruited to work on Cuban sugar plantations owned by US companies, the composition of the migration was primarily male. Given the high proportion of men, Haitian migration to Cuba during the occupation has largely been interpreted through a male perspective. Studies have generally focused on the conditions of laborers, presented as exclusively male, on sugar estates. The attention given to male labor migrants has framed the study of the movement of Haitian women to Cuba. When Haitian women have been considered, their mobility has been defined in relation to Haitian men, stripping Haitian women of their agency. In this paper, I argue for a reinterpretation of Haitian migration to Cuba that considers the mobility of Haitian women independently of Haitian men, based on the descriptions of two Haitian women who migrated unaccompanied to the Bahamas. In presenting their stories, I draw on observations gained from ethnographic fieldwork among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas during the late 1990s to call into question the historical depiction of Haitian women in Cuba. I discuss the hardships unaccompanied Haitian women faced in the Bahamas and propose that these difficulties would have been similar for Haitian women who migrated independently to Cuba. Given the scale of the migration and the role of foreign interests and investments in its direction, the migration of Haitian peasants to Cuba during the US occupation of Haiti established precedents that were repeated in later movements across the Caribbean, including the Bahamas. Understanding the conditions under which Haitian women migrated to Cuba, therefore, is critical for interpreting subsequent migrations of Haitian women in the region.

Black labor, white sugar: Caribbean braceros and their struggle for power in the Cuban sugar industry

Black labor, white sugar: Caribbean braceros and their struggle for power in the Cuban sugar industry

Catholic Conspirators? Religious Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Previously untapped, Catholic Church records document historic networks among free black communities in Havana, Matanzas and other Atlantic ports. In earlier centuries, membership in overlapping religious and military corporations advanced their interests and gained them status in Spanish society. The slave revolt of Saint-Domingue, the Cuban sugar boom and the rise of abolitionist activity, however, caused their position to deteriorate rapidly in the nineteenth century. The alleged conspiracies of Aponte in 1812 and La Escalera in 1844 ruined them. Leaders were executed and hundreds more were deported in an Atlantic diaspora. Ironically, the well-recorded connections these groups maintained in the military and the Catholic Church allowed Cuban officials to target them and neither previous loyalty nor service could save them.

Saberes Híbridos: las Sugar Companys y la moderna plantación azucarera en Cuba

From the studies on the production and dissemination of knowledge, this paper explores the encounter and exchange between local and global practices and knowledge within the sugar plantation between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a process defined as “hybrid knowledge”. This article echoes the studies are in the region as a model of interregional also referred. Highlights some elements of Western Cuba sugar transferred to new plantations east through negotiation between local knowledge and practices and American knowledge, not without personal, imperial, scientific or businesstensions.

Freedom's mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the age of revolution

Introduction: the Haitian Revolution and Cuban slave society 1. 'A colony worth a kingdom': Cuba's sugar revolution in the shadow of Saint-Domingue 2. 'An excess of communication': the capture of news in a slave society 3. An unlikely alliance: Cuba and the black auxiliaries 4. Revolution's disavowal: Cuba and a counterrevolution of slavery 5. 'Masters of all': echoes of Haitian independence in Cuba 6. Atlantic crucible: 1808 between Haiti and Spain 7. A black kingdom of this world: making history, imagining revolution in Havana, 1812 Epilogue: Haiti, Cuba, and history: afterlives of antislavery and revolution.

Monsters by trade: slave traffickers in modern Spanish literature and culture

Transatlantic studies have begun to explore the lasting influence of Spain on its former colonies and the surviving ties between the American nations and Spain. In Monsters by Trade, Lisa Surwillo takes a different approach, explaining how modern Spain was literally made by its Cuban colony. Long after the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished, Spain continued to smuggle thousands of Africans annually to Cuba to work the sugar plantations. Nearly a third of the royal income came from Cuban sugar, and these profits underwrote Spain's modernization even as they damaged its international standing. Surwillo analyzes a sampling of nineteenth-century Spanish literary works that reflected metropolitan fears of the hold that slave traders (and the slave economy more generally) had over the political, cultural, and financial networks of power. She also examines how the nineteenth-century empire and the role of the slave trader are commemorated in contemporary tourism and literature in various regions in Northern Spain. This is the first book to demonstrate the centrality of not just Cuba, but the illicit transatlantic slave trade to the cultural life of modern Spain.

Sugar, Empire, and Revolution in Eastern Cuba: The Guantánamo Sugar Company Records in the Cuban Heritage Collection

Les archives de The Guantánamo Sugar Company dans la Collection Héritage Cubaines à l’Université de Miami représentent peu de sources de documentaires accessibles sur la plantation sucrière de la province de Guantanamo à Cuba républicain. Peu de chercheurs et pratiquement aucune publication ont utilisé cette collection. Cette riche collection de documents sur Guantanamo permettra aux chercheurs de comprendre et d’établir des relations entre les dynamiques politiques, économiques et sociales avec des processus nationaux, régionaux et globaux. Cette collection servira aussi à tous ceux qui s’intéressent aux différentes questions régionales à l’intérieur du Cuba. Cette note de recherche a utilisé les archives pour explorer les dossiers locaux du territoire, le travail et la politique de Guantanamo durant l’époque républicaine dans le contexte plus profond des processus nationaux et internationaux. La collection est spécialement utile à cause de ses illustrations sur les compagnies sucrières durant la Révolution proclamée en 1959. Cette note identifie des sources utiles pour les chercheurs travaillant sur l’histoire des commerces, la science, la technologie et l’environnement.

Revisión crítica de los estudios recientes sobre el origen y la transformación de la Cuba colonial azucarera y esclavista

Recientemente se han publicado muchos estudios sobre la industria azucarera de Cuba que han actualizado la historiografía y su participación en los debates internacionales. Este artículo analiza los referidos al lapso 1765-1898, entre el inicio de la expansión del sector usando trabajo esclavo, en torno a lo cual se redefinió el pacto colonial con España, y la transformación que sufrió tras las abolición y en el que acabó el colonialismo hispano. Quedan aspectos por analizar y los años 1870-1898 arecen de suficiente investigación, pero el avance en el conocimiento ha sido notable, se han explorado épocas y asuntos hasta ahora ignotos y superado sesgos y tópicos anteriores. Por ejemplo, se muestra que la redefinición del colonialismo español fue coherente en sus circunstancias, que es discutible hablar de una contradicción entre esclavitud y cambio tecnológico o que los azucareros criollos no fueron sujetos pasivos en las redes mercantiles y financieras de su negocio.<br /><br />

Turning Javanese: The Domination of Cuba's Sugar Industry by Java Cane Varieties

By the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, two islands had come to dominate global cane-sugar production. For most of the sixty-year period between 1870 and 1930, around half of the world's internationally traded crop came from Cuba and Java. The two islands had many topographical similarities that made them particularly well suited to the establishment of sugar plantations: both are relatively large islands with fertile soils and semi-tropical climate. They were also situated in regions that had been drawn into the European sphere of influence in the sixteenth century but that had only been lightly exploited before the nineteenth, when they were both well placed to assume leading roles in the satisfaction of the escalating demand for sugar in the industrialising societies of Europe and North America.However, Cuba and Java existed within two very distinct sets of imperial and commercial networks: Spanish and Atlantic, and Dutch and Indian Ocean respectively. As a result of this, while there have been a plethora of studies about cane agriculture and the sugar industry in each of the islands, there has been little effort to compare their histories or explore the interconnections between them. Only recently has a start been made to study systematically the “convergence and divergence” of the sugar industry in the two hemispheres and to compare the differences and similarities to be found in the paths followed by the two islands.Although the sugar industries of Cuba and Java took different directions, these were inextricably linked. While Cuban planters could exploit the availability of large areas of underused land to overcome the relative scarcity of labour, planters in Java took advantage of the relative abundance of labour to maximise yields from the more limited land available to them. As a consequence of this, Javanese planters influenced by the work of Cuban agronomist Álvaro Reynoso paid considerable attention to the development of scientific methods in cane cultivation. Meanwhile, Reynoso's ideas fell on deaf ears in his home island, where most planters ignored the need for a more scientific approach in the fields in favour of technological advances in the sugar factory and what they saw as their immediate commercial interests.

Douglas Henry McKAY, CBE, 1923-2012

Douglas Henry McKAY, CBE, 1923-2012

Pozzolanic behaviour of a bagasse ash from the boiler of a Cuban sugar factory

The paper presents a study of the pozzolanic reaction kinetics between calcium hydroxide and sugar cane bagasse ash (SCBAB) from the boiler of a sugar factory. A pozzolanic activity method (conductometric method) based on measurement of the electrical conductivity of the SCBAB/calcium hydroxide solution as the reaction proceeds is applied and the kinetic parameters are then quantified by applying a kinetic–diffusive model to the process. The kinetic parameters that characterise the process (in particular, the reaction rate constant and the free energy of activation) were determined with relative accuracy in the fitting process of the model. The pozzolanic activity is quantitatively evaluated according to the obtained values of the kinetic parameters. Other experimental techniques, such as X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy, are also employed. Comparison with another bagasse ash calcined under controlled conditions in the laboratory is carried out. The results show the good pozzolanic properties of the SCBAB from the boiler of the sugar factory.

At Work in the Fields of Their Lords

Studies of Atlantic slave societies abound, but few discuss the technological capacity of slave economies or the skilled artisans and technicians who worked plantations. This lack stems primarily from the traditional view that slavery is incompatible with technological innovation, and that artisans, peasants, and petty merchants are politically inert. Jonathan Curry-Machado's Cuban Sugar Industry and Lyman L. Johnson's _ l Workshop of Revolution challenge this traditional view by investigating skilled workers in the slave societies of Cuba and Buenos Aires. Curry Machado demonstrates that nineteenth-century Cuba led global sugar production because its progressive planters invested heavily in modern and efficient machinery and contracted foreign technicians to operate and maintain it. Urban Buenos Aires had no plantations, but many migrant artisans—slave and free, of all races and ethnicities—providing for an ever-increasing urban population. Artisans participated in slave unrest in both societies, and played a leading role in Buenos Aires's 1810 independence.

Cuban Sugar Industry: Transnational Networks and Engineering Migrants in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba

Cuban Sugar Industry: Transnational Networks and Engineering Migrants in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba

Cuban Sugar Industry. Transnational Networks and Engineering in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba by Jonathan Curry-Machado (review)

Cuban Sugar Industry. Transnational Networks and Engineering in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba by Jonathan Curry-Machado (review)