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May 7, 2024
directly or indirectly but decisively, it spurred the growth of Dutch, French, English, and U.S. industry.
Once again, New World labor and resources funded the industry for the West
The Northeast was Brazil’s richest area and is now its poorest; in Barbados and Haiti human antheaps live condemned to penury; in Cuba sugar became the master key for U. S. domination, at the price of monoculture and the relentless impoverishment of the soil.
Again, the theme of the once richest areas being exploited to the point that they are now the most impoverished
The more a product is desired by the world market, the greater the misery it brings to the Latin American peoples whose sacrifice creates it.
**
Barbados’s black population increased tenfold in a few decades.
Sugar had destroyed the Northeast. The humid coastal fringe, well watered by rains, had a soil of great fertility, rich in humus and mineral salts and covered by forests from Bahia to Ceará. This region of tropical forests was turned into a region of savannas. Naturally fitted to produce food, it became a place of hunger. Where everything had bloomed exuberantly, the destructive and all-dominating latifundio left sterile rock, washed-out soil, eroded lands. At first there had been orange and mango plantations, but these were left to their fate, or reduced to small orchards surrounding the
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How the sugar industry annihilated the Brazilian environment
The price of half a kilo of manioc starch equals the wage an adult sugar-plantation worker receives for working from sunrise to sunset:
Wage slavery; intense separation of laborer from that which the labor produces
Turned into a wage-worker, the peasant who had previously tilled his small plot experienced no benefit, since he did not earn enough money to buy what he had once produced. As usual, the expansion expanded hunger.
*see previous note
The international division of labor was not organized by the Holy Ghost but by men—more precisely, as a result of the world development of capitalism.
today unemployment and poverty are these islands’ permanent guests.
Barbados suffered no better fate than the Brazilian Northeast. It had previously produced a variety of crops on small holdings: cotton and tobacco, oranges, cows and pigs. Canefields devoured all this and devastated the dense forests in the name of a glorious illusion. The island soon found that its soil was exhausted, that it was unable to feed its population, and that it was producing sugar at uncompetitive prices.
Specialized niche
Che Guevara quoted at the OAS Punta del Este conference in 1961, “The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country, and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one.”
By 1850 the United States was absorbing one-third of all Cuban trade, selling it more and buying more from it than Spain,
“Little by little the whole island of Cuba is passing into the hands of U.S. citizens, which is the simplest and safest way to obtain annexation to the United States.”
“Until Castro came to power, the United States had such an irresistible influence in Cuba that the U.S. ambassador was the country’s second personage, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president.”
“Cuba,” he said in his resounding defense plea, “continues to be a producer of raw materials. We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows.”8 Cuba bought not only automobiles, machinery, chemical products, paper, and clothing, but also rice and beans, garlic and onions, fats, meat, and cotton, all from the United States.
Thirteen U.S. sugar producers owned more than 47 percent of the total area planted to cane and garnered some $ 180 million from each harvest.
Despite the great amount of sugar exported from Cuba, most profits went to the US companies that controlled the plantations
In 1958 Cuba had more registered prostitutes than mine workers and a million and a half Cubans were wholly or partly unemployed.
Half of its children did not go to school in 1958, but, as Fidel Castro has said many times, the ignorance was much broader and more serious than mere illiteracy. The big campaign of 1961 mobilized an army of young volunteers to teach all Cubans to read and write, and the results astonished the world: according to UNESCO’s Department of Education, Cuba now has the lowest percentage of illiterates and the highest percentage attending primary and secondary school in Latin America.
Amazing results from Castro revolution and Cuban independence
A lack of efficient technicians, administrative incompetence and disorganization of production, and a bureaucratic fear of creative imagination and decision still obstruct the development of socialism. Yet despite the whole structure of impotence forged by four and one-half centuries of oppression, Cuba is being reborn with an enthusiasm that never flags: against obstacles it matches its strength, its gaiety, and its audacity.
Foreign opposition to socialist Cuban govt
“the people have a great love for martyrs—but only after they’re dead. Before, there’s nothing but complaints.”
Opposition to progressivism in the present; looking back with respect when it is in the past
every socialized farm proceeded to make sudden and excessive variations in its crops.
Diversification of goods produced
Yet there had to be large-scale imports to industrialize the country, raise agricultural production, and satisfy many consumer needs which, in redistributing wealth, the Revolution enormously increased.
Still a great need for imports to build up and strengthen the Cuban economy; embargoes stifled this development
There was no alternative but to use the fruits of monoculture and dependence, born of Cuba’s incorporation into the world market, to break the spine of that monoculture and dependence. No longer was the income earned by sugar to go to consolidate the structure of submission.*
the economic surplus generated by sugar has been mobilized to develop basic industries and to see that neither lands nor workers are condemned to idleness.
Here one must bear in mind that in a socialist society, unlike in a capitalist one, workers are not motivated by fear of unemployment or by avarice. Other drives—solidarity, collective responsibility, awareness of the duties and rights that move a man beyond selfishness—must be brought into play. And the conscience of a whole people is not changed in a moment.
Socialist motivations to work
the Revolution proceeded to turn its promises of social justice into solid facts. It built 170 new hospitals and as many polyclinics, and made medical care free. It multiplied by three the number of students enrolled at all levels and also made education free; more than 300,000 children and youths benefit today from scholarships, and boarding schools and kindergartens have proliferated. A large part of the population pays no rent and no one pays for water, light, public telephones, funerals, or sporting events. Spending on social services increased five times in a few years. But now that
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Socialism moment
the country now belongs to everyone, consumption is by all, not just a few.
The Cubans themselves have learned that socialism is built with clenched teeth and that revolution is no evening stroll.
Adam Smith said that one of the principal effects of the discovery of America “has been to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.”
Back in 1562 Captain John Hawkins had smuggled 300 blacks out of Portuguese Guinea. Queen Elizabeth was furious: “It was detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven upon the undertakers,” she cried.12 But Hawkins told her that in exchange for the slaves he had a cargo of sugar, hides, pearls, and ginger in the Caribbean, and she forgave the pirate and became his business partner.
Profits trump ethics
On the voyage many Africans died of epidemics or malnutrition; others commited suicide by refusing to eat, hanging themselves by their chains, or throwing themselves into a sea bristling with sharks’ fins.
Often, death was more favorable than life enslaved
“they are carried like sheep to the slaughter and that Europeans are fond of their flesh. …”13 The cat-o’-nine-tails could do little to contain the Africans’ desperate suicides.
^^
Early in the nineteenth century Britain became the leader in the anti-slavery campaign. British industry needed international markets with more purchasing power, which led it to preach the gospel of wages.
in New England, and this facilitated both its economic development and its political independence. In New England the slave trade gave birth to a large part of the capital that produced the U.S. industrial revolution. In the middle of the eighteenth century Northern slave ships carried barrels of rum to Africa from Boston, Newport, and Providence; they exchanged the rum for slaves, sold the slaves in the Caribbean, and from there brought molasses to Massachusetts, where it was distilled and converted into rum, completing the cycle.
How slavery built up the northern US, before they fought a war in the name of its abolition
THE RAINBOW IS THE ROAD BACK TO GUINEA
African cultural traditions, religions, and languages have been preserved despite their attempted erasure by the Portuguese
it is all a matter of how they are handled. I found on arrival here some cunning niggers, and others who had taken to the woods; I thrashed some, cut off the ears of others, and there has been no more trouble.”
Brutal treatment of slaves
The slaves who had won liberty defended it ably and bravely because they shared its fruits: land in the black state was held in common and no money circulated. No slave rebellion in world history lasted as long as that in Palmares:
No fewer than 10,000 people defended the last bastion of Palmares; the survivors were beheaded, thrown from precipices, or sold to merchants
In Cuba, too, there were risings. Some slaves committed mass suicide, mocking their masters, as Fernando Ortiz has put it, “with their eternal strikes, their unending flight to the other world.” They thought they would thus be brought back to life, body and soul, in Africa. By mutilating the corpses so they would return to life castrated, maimed, or decapitated, the masters dissuaded many from killing themselves.
Mass suicides of slaves; response by masters to get them to stop
“Administrators should under no circumstances be permitted to administer kicks in the belly to pregnant women nor beatings to the slaves, since anger may prevail over restraint and an efficient and valuable slave may be injured in the head and lost.”18 In Cuba, overseers applied their thongs of hide or hemp to the backs of pregnant females who had erred, but not before stretching them out with their bellies over a hole to avoid damaging “the little creature”; priests, who received 5 percent of sugar production as a tithe, gave Christian absolution;
Church profiting from slavery and using religion to justify their horrific actions
Your body may be enslaved, but your soul remains free to fly one day to the happy mansions of the chosen.”
Twisting Christianity teachings to the slaves
* One Holy Thursday the Count of Casa Bayona decided to humiliate himself before his slaves. Inflamed with Christian fervor, he washed the feet of twelve blacks and invited them to dine with him at his table. It was in truth the last supper. Next day the slaves rebelled and set fire to the sugarmill. Their heads were stuck on twelve lances in the middle of the estate.
In 1878, 120,000 of Ceará’s 800,000 population headed for the Amazon and less than half got there; the rest collapsed from hunger or disease on the sertão trails or in the suburbs of Fortaleza.
The pay was in kind—dried meat, manioc flour, lumps of unrefined sugar, aguardiente—until the rubber worker paid off his debts, a miracle that rarely occurred. Employers had an agreement among themselves not to give jobs to workers who were in debt to other employers. Debts piled on debts. To the cost of transport from the Northeast were added the debts for work tools, machetes, knives, and eating bowls; and since the worker consumed food—and above all liquor, never a scarce commodity in the rubber forests—the longer he worked the higher his accumulated debt.
Slave debt
The pay was in kind—dried meat, manioc flour, lumps of unrefined sugar, aguardiente—until the rubber worker paid off his debts, a miracle that rarely occurred. Employers had an agreement among themselves not to give jobs to workers who were in debt to other employers. Debts piled on debts. To the cost of transport from the Northeast were added the debts for work tools, machetes, knives, and eating bowls; and since the worker consumed food—and above all liquor, never a scarce commodity in the rubber forests—the longer he worked the higher his accumulated debt.
Debt accumulated for everything from use of tools for work and bowls for meals
The rubber-tree was bringing Brazil a tenth of its export income in 1890, and by 1910 this had risen to 40 percent, making rubber sales almost equal to those of coffee, although coffee was then at the height of its prosperity.
In 1913 sudden disaster hit Brazilian rubber. The world price fell to a quarter of the two shillings it had been three years earlier. The Far East had only exported four tons of rubber in 1900; in 1914 Ceylonese and Malay plantations poured over 70,000 tons onto the world market, and within five years their exports approached the 400,000-ton mark. By 1919 Brazil, which had had a virtual monopoly, was supplying only one-eighth of world consumption. A half-century later Brazil is buying more than half its rubber from abroad.
Dependency upon profits from exports and the world market price, and dependency upon imports of the goods no longer produced domestically; specialized niche
the government also uses its bottomless reserve of cheap labor for public works. The naked men who built the city of Brasilia almost overnight were Northeasterners transported like cattle to the wilderness site. Today this most modern of the world’s cities is surrounded by a great belt of poverty: when they finished their work, these people—known as candangos—were dumped in outlying hovels. There, always available for any task, 300,000 Northeasterners live off the splendid capital’s leavings.
Like sugarcane, cacao means monoculture, the burning of forests, the dictatorship of international prices, and perpetual penury for the workers. The plantation owners, who live on the Rio de Janeiro beaches and are more businessmen than farmers, do not permit a single inch of land to be devoted to other crops.
for payment of debts. * In Brazil the title of “colonel” is conferred with the greatest ease on old-established latifundistas and, by extension, on all important persons. The quoted passage comes from Jorge Amado’s novel São Jorge dos Ilhéus (1946). From another novel, Cacao (1935): “Not even the children touched the cacao fruit. They were afraid of those yellow berries, so sweet on the inside, which enslaved them to this life of breadfruit and dried meat.”
