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.

This book examines the modernization of the Cuban sugar industry from the end of the Cuban War of Independence throughout the ensuing boom in the sugar industry. An underlying theme of the book is the close connection between the technical and organizational changes in the Cuban sugar industry and the technological changes behind the managerial revolution in industrial countries. The technical changes in the sugar industry, marked by the diffusion of mass production technologies and the adoption in Cuba of modern central factories, were characteristic of most progressive industries of that time. In general, the application of mass production technologies heralded the transition from proprietorships to modern hierarchical and corporate forms of business organization. This book links the development in the Cuban sugar industry to the global movement in business organization and technology that has been referred to as the rise of managerial capitalism. The first three decades of the twentieth century have been recognized as critical in Cuba's history, because the economic foundations -- including the rise of sugar latifundismo -- were laid for the Cuban revolution. Most of the existing literature has focused on the social impact of the profound socio-economic and institutional changes that came with the massive entrance of capital from North America. The line of investigation in this book is unique in that it examines the economic factors that underlay these socio-economic and institutional changes. What have frequently been seen as the effects of political intervention or imperialism the author identifies as economic outcomes caused by mass production technology. This is the firstbook to apply the tools of the "new economic history" to Cuba, complementing traditional historical methods with rigorous use of economic theory, transaction-cost economics, and quantitative methods to arrive at its conclusions.

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.

In 1963 Cuba launched a program to develop its economy by expanding its sugar production and export trade. Cuban economists believed that through intensive development of this leading sector, they could generate capital to invest in manufacturing and thus move away from a one-crop economy.After providing background information on Cuba's prerevolutionary economy, Brunner explores the effects of Communist ideology and the U.S. embargo on the country's resources and trade, and analyzes the problems Cuba faced in shifting from trade with the U.S. to trade with the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc. He evaluates their implementation of the development plan, assessing the sugar industry within Cuba as well as how its accelerated development affected the rest of the domestic economy.

Engaging conventional arguments that the persistence of plantations is the cause of economic underdevelopment in the Caribbean, this book focuses on the discontinuities in the development of plantation economies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century. Cesar Ayala analyzes and compares the explosive growth of sugar production in the three nations following the War of 1898--when the U.S. acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico--to show how closely the development of the Spanish Caribbean's modern economic and social class systems is linked to the history of the U.S. sugar industry during its greatest period of expansion and consolidation. Ayala examines patterns of investment and principal groups of investors, interactions between U.S. capitalists and native planters, contrasts between new and old regions of sugar monoculture, the historical formation of the working class on sugar plantations, and patterns of labor migration. In contrast to most studies of the Spanish Caribbean, which focus on only one country, his account places the history of U.S. colonialism in the region, and the history of plantation agriculture across the region, in comparative perspective.

The Cuban Economy in ​a New Era diagnoses the ills afflicting Cuba's economy and examines seven areas: macroeconomic policy, central planning, small and medium private enterprises, nonagricultural cooperatives, financing options for the new private sector, state enterprise management, and relations with international financial institutions.

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.