Coffee remained on the U.S. duty-free list, and the message Puerto Rican coffee planters received from their new government was clear: as part of the United States, they were on their own economically. In effect, when coffee became a “domestic” American product through the acquisition of colonies in 1898, it also became the first American mass-consumer commodity to be outsourced abroad as a matter of political and economic strategy. This was welcome news in Central America, but it was a disaster in Puerto Rico, where coffee cherries rotted on the trees, and the collapse of the industry caused
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