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.