Social and Economic Aspects of Sugar Production in Cuba, 1880-1930

Abstract

After the slaves were emancipated between 1880 and 1886, the planter class in Cuba underwent a transformation. Successful mill owners modernized their facilities, increased their cane-processing capabilities, and became planter-industrialists. Unsuccessful mill owners who lacked sufficient capital to modernize dismantled their outdated mills and became simply cane farmers. The social structure of the sugar mills was also transformed. Wage labor and tenancy arrangements replaced slave labor, and the industrial process of cane milling became separate from the agricultural processes of planting and harvesting sugarcane. As industrial units became fewer but larger, they could grind more sugarcane than that grown on the land directly under their ownership, and the larger mills therefore entered into arrangements with surrounding mill owners who were unable to make the transition to the new technological phase of sugar milling. Because the new mills centralized the grinding of cane previously carried out by many smaller units, they became known as ingenios centrales and eventually as simply centrales. Planters who gave up their obsolete milling operations and turned exclusively to cane farming were called colonos.