Nineteenth-century Cuba led the world in sugar manufacture and technological innovation was central to this. Through the story of a group of forgotten migrant workers who anonymously contributed to Cuba's development, this book explores the development of the Cuban sugar industry and how the country became bound into global networks.

Sugar, the backbone of the Cuban economic life for centuries, continues to dominate the economy of socialist Cuba. After initial attempts at diversification following the Revolution, the Cuban regime rehabilitated the sugar industry in 1965, making the country again vulnerable to swings in world market prices and the dangers of overdependence on a single agricultural product.Perez-L—pez examines the various efforts at economic planning in the years following the Revolution and provides in-depth analysis of aspects particular to the sugar industry: cultivation, mechanization, energy and transportation, refining and the manufacture of sugar derivatives, production costs, and foreign trade.

Early in the twentieth century, the Cuban sugarcane industry faced a labor crisis when Cuban and European workers balked at the inhumane conditions they endured in the cane fields. Rather than reforming their practices, sugar companies gained permission from the Cuban government to import thousands of black workers from other Caribbean colonies, primarily Haiti and Jamaica. Black Labor, White Sugar illuminates the story of these immigrants, their exploitation by the sugarcane companies, and the strategies they used to fight back. Philip A. Howard traces the socioeconomic and political circumstances in Haiti and Jamaica that led men to leave their homelands to cut, load, and haul sugarcane in Cuba. Once there, the field workers, or braceros, were subject to marginalization and even violence from the sugar companies, which used structures of race, ethnicity, color, and class to subjugate these laborers. Howard argues that braceros drew on their cultural identities-from concepts of home and family to spiritual worldviews-to interpret and contest their experiences in Cuba. They also fought against their exploitation in more overt ways. As labor conditions worsened in response to falling sugar prices, the principles of anarcho-syndicalism converged with the Pan-African philosophy of Marcus Garvey to foster the evolution of a protest culture among black Caribbean laborers. By the mid-1920s, this identity encouraged many braceros to participate in strikes that sought to improve wages as well as living and working conditions. The first full-length exploration of Haitian and Jamaican workers in the Cuban sugarcane industry, Black Labor, White Sugar examines the industry's abuse of thousands of black Caribbean immigrants, and the braceros' answering struggle for power and self-definition.

One of the key issues that faces Cuban policymakers today, and will continue to face them, is what steps to take in order to ensure the future of the sugar industry. In 2002, nearly one-half of the country's cultivated land was occupied by the 156 fully functional sugar mills, more than a dozen plants and refineries, and the complex transportation infrastructure brought about by the commerce. The loss of preferential markets for Cuban sugar that arose from the demise of the international socialist community constitutes a crisis that the Cuban government has only begun to address, with a radical restructuring plan that would foresee the reduction of sugar land and the elimination of about 100,000 jobs, for increased economic emphasis on tourism. The radical premise of this volume is that there is a future in the twenty-first century for a reinvented Cuban sugar agroindustry, responsive to market signals, organized around smaller and more agile production units, producing raw sugar as well as high value-added outputs, and using some of the facilities to produce ethanol and generate electricity. The editors have asked over a dozen recognized world experts on Cuban agroindustry to analyze specific topics and make recommendations that would not only reinvent an industry for effective transition to a free-market environment but that has the potential to reinvigorate the Cuban economy, providing employment opportunities and generating wealth for generations of Cubans to come.

Following forty years of tension between Cuba and the United States, this study of Cuba's agro-industry presents the results of a remarkable collaboration between researchers living in the two countries. The authors consider the prospects for the sugar industry - offering scenarios of a smaller, more efficient role in the economy - and examine reforms of the early 1990s.