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September 30, 2017 - May 5, 2021
“See that? On the front of that church, the sun and moon. That means that the slaves worked day and night. This church was built by black men; that one by white men.
From the conquest of Brazil until abolition, it is estimated that some 10 million blacks were brought from Africa; there are no precise figures for the eighteenth century, but the gold cycle absorbed slave labor in prodigious quantities.
the plantation was feudal in many important aspects, and its labor force consisted mainly of slaves. Thus three distinct historical periods—mercantilism, feudalism, slavery—were combined in a single socioeconomic unit. But in the constellation of power developed by the plantation system, the international market soon took the center of the stage.
Subordinated to foreign needs and often financed from abroad, the colonial plantation evolved directly into the present-day latifundio, one of the bottlenecks that choke economic development and condemn the masses to poverty and a marginal existence in Latin America today.
It feeds upon the proliferation of minifundios— pocket-sized farms—resulting from its own expansion, and upon the constant internal migration of a legion of workers who, driven by hunger, move around to the rhythm of successive harvests.
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.
A legacy of those colonial days which continues is the custom of eating dirt. Lack of iron produces anemia, and instinct leads Northeastern children to eat dirt to gain the mineral salts which are absent from their diet of manioc starch, beans, and—with luck—dried meat. In former times this “African vice” was punished by putting muzzles on the children or by hanging them in willow baskets far above the ground.*
As a result of sugar monoculture it is a concentration camp for 30 million people—on the same soil that produced the most lucrative business of the colonial agricultural economy in Latin America.
A United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report in 1957 said that in the area of Victoria, near Recife, protein deficiency in children produces a weight loss 40 percent worse than is generally found in Africa.
Many plantations still operate private prisons, but, as René Dumont notes, “those who are responsible for murder by undernourishment are not locked inside, since they are the keepers of the keys.”
In various ways the Northeast is the victim of internal colonialism for the benefit of the industrialized south. Within the Northeast, the sertão region is subordinated to the sugarbelt which it supplies, and the latifundios in their turn are subordinated to processing plants that industrialize sugar production. The ancient institution of the individually owned sugar estate is in crisis: the central mills have devoured the plantations.
In the Northeast not even progress is progressive, for it is in the hands of a few owners. The food of the minority is the hunger of the majority.
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.
“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.”
Puerto Rico, another sugar factory, remained a prisoner. From the U.S. standpoint, Puerto Ricans are not good enough to live in a country of their own but are good enough to die in Vietnam for a country which is not theirs. In proportion to population, the “Free Associated State” of Puerto Rico has more soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia than the rest of the United States. Puerto Ricans resisting compulsory military service in Vietnam are sent to U.S. penitentiaries. Other humiliations inherited from the invasion of 1898 and blessed by law (the law of the U.S. Congress) are added to service
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“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.”
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.
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.
As Auguste Cochin wrote: “The story of a grain of sugar is a whole lesson in political economy, in politics, and also in morality.”
According to Sergio Bagú, the most potent force for the accumulation of mercantile capital was slavery in the Americas; and this capital in turn became “the foundation stone on which the giant industrial capital of modern times was built.”
“It’s easier to buy niggers than to breed them.”
The first law expressly banning slavery in Brazil was not Brazilian. It was—and not by accident—English. The British parliament voted it on August 8, 1845.
For the people of Haiti the rainbow still symbolizes the road back to Guinea—in a ship with a white sail.
No slave rebellion in world history lasted as long as that in Palmares: Spartacus’s rebellion, which shook the most important slave system of ancient times, lasted eighteen months.
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; the overseer administered punishment like Jesus Christ castigating sinners.
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.
The Northeast contains 6 million landless peasants while 15,000 people own half of all the land.
The lot of Nicaraguan cotton workers is much worse, and Salvadorans, who supply cotton to Japanese textile industries, consume fewer calories and proteins than the hungry peasants of India.
Latin American countries use depreciated foreign currency from coffee sales to buy ever costlier U.S. products.
In the United States and Europe coffee creates income and jobs and mobilizes substantial capital; in Latin America it pays hunger wages and sharpens economic deformation.
The rich countries that preach free trade apply stern protectionist policies against the poor countries: they turn everything they touch—including the underdeveloped countries’ own production—into gold for themselves and rubbish for others.
the prosperity of a class really identifiable with the well-being of a country?
the government sent police and soldiers to cut off testicles, slash pregnant women’s bellies, and throw babies in the air to catch on bayonet points—the order of the day being “don’t leave even the seed.”
the corte corbata, for example, left the tongue hanging from the neck.
In one of these operations alone—the crushing of the rebels in Marquetalia—1.5 million projectiles were fired, 20,000 bombs were dropped, and 16,000 soldiers were mobilized on the ground and in the air.
the Central American latifundio of today was born under the banner of free labor.
They are the world market’s “labor reserve.”
the latifundio and minifundio together make up a system based on ruthless exploitation of Indian labor.
In the geopolitical concept of imperialism, Central America is no more than a natural appendage of the United States.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.
In Europe and the United States people had started to eat bananas, so they cut down the jungles through Central America to plant bananas, and built railroads to haul the bananas, and every year more steamboats of the Great White Fleet steamed north loaded with bananas, and that is the history of the American empire in the Caribbean, and the Panama canal and the future Nicaragua canal and the marines and the battleships and the bayonets.40
The epic of Augusto César Sandino stirred the world. The long struggle of Nicaragua’s guerrilla leader was rooted in the angry peasants’ demand for land. His small ragged army fought for some years against 12,000 U.S. invaders and the National Guard. Sardine tins filled with stones served as grenades, Springfield rifles were stolen from the enemy, and there were plenty of machetes; the flag flew from any handy stick, and the peasants moved through mountain thickets wearing strips of hide called huaraches instead of boots.
The guerrillas sang, to the tune of Adelita: In Nicaragua, gentlemen, the mouse kills the cat.
“Of the 70,000 people who die each year in Guatemala, 30,000 are children. The infant mortality rate in Guatemala is forty times higher than in the United States.”
“the United States has virtually reduced Diaz to a political dependency, and by so doing has virtually transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the United States.”
Latin American agricultural and livestock production per capita is lower today than on the eve of World War II. During the thirty years since then, world production of food has grown in the same proportion as it has fallen in Latin America. The structure of backwardness in our countryside also functions as a structure of waste: waste of labor, of available land, of capital, of the product, and above all of the fleeting opportunities for development that history has offered. In almost all Latin American countries the latifundio—and its poor relation the minifundio—are the bottlenecks choking
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1.5 percent of the agricultural landlords own half of all the cultivable land, and every year Latin America spends more than $500 million on importing food that its own broad and fertile lands could produce without difficulty. Hardly 5 percent of the total area is under cultivation: the lowest proportion—and consequently the greatest waste—on earth.
Landlords increase their profits by adopting more modern ways to exploit their properties; as more hands become idle, the gap separating rich and poor only widens.
