The Three Colonial Cubas
Some notes on periodization
As most of you probably already know, I have a podcast; Orígenes: A Cuban History Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. As I start writing the next episode of the podcast, I decided to write a short note on how historians sometimes periodize colonial Cuba.
There were at least three separate periods of early colonial Cuba.
The ‘first’ colonial Cuba: A short-lived phase from the 1510s until the 1550s, during which the colony was mostly a backwater and whose colonists exploited forced native labor to extract gold from rivers. This forced labor regime, the encomienda, would be abolished by the mid-16th century, and in any case both native populations and easily accessible gold deposits were so depleted that it was totally unsustainable. By the end of this period gold exports had been reduced to a trickle.
The ‘second’ colonial Cuba: a much longer phase, from the 1550s until the 1760s or so, when Western Cuba specialized in tobacco exports and limited sugar exports, but the core of the region’s economy was servicing the Spanish treasure fleet. Havana was the last colonial stopover on the way back to Europe, so it became both one of the best fortified cities in the whole of the Americas and an increasingly cosmopolitan city whose role as a key stopover put it in contact with the latest happenings across the Spanish Empire. Eastern Cuba, by contrast, was increasingly abandoned by Spain’s trade networks, at least until the Bourbon reforms in the 18th century, specializing instead on contraband trade with foreigners who at times played the role of merchants and at times that of pirates. Cuba’s classic epic poem, the Espejo de Paciencia, is literally a literary plea to the King of Spain to not depopulate Eastern Cuba as he had Western Hispaniola (now Haiti) for the crime of constant contraband. During this era the institutions and economic powerhouse of the island slowly shifted West to Havana from its original basis in Eastern cities like Bayamo and Santiago.
The ‘third’ colonial Cuba, dating from the second half of the 18th century all the way to the end of the colonial era. This ‘sugar century’ saw the island’s diverse economy slowly but surely become enthralled to the pull of sugar profits, which gobbled up not just subsistence agriculture (especially rice) but coffee and other traditional agricultural exports. The Ten Years War (1868-1878), fought by mostly smaller Eastern planters who couldn’t compete with the big plantation economy of Western Cuba, both accelerated this model’s expansion and undermined it, in different ways. It accelerated it in that by the end of the century the sugar economy had spread virtually across the entire island, with important exceptions like arid Camaguey and Las Tunas, where cattle still dominated thanks to being so inhospitable to sugar, and Pinar del Río, where tobacco production continued among smallholders.
While most people associate Cuba with this ‘third’ and last colonial Cuba, in reality it was merely one of several economic models which drove the island’s economy during its four centuries of colonial rule. Given the centrality of sugar well into the 20th century, arguably only ending its grip on the Cuban economy in 2005 when Fidel dismantled most of the refineries, it is totally understandable that the island and the sugar export model seem synonymous in the popular imagination. However, it is always good to remember that Cuba was in reality a relative latecomer to the sugar game.
The sugar plantation was present as an institution in colonial Cuba from as early as the 1520s, but sugar only played a limited role in the overall economy of the island and even of cities that had plantations nearby, like Havana. In the early modern era, Atlantic sugar was first dominated by colonial Brazil in the 16th century, then the sugar islands of the British West Indies in the 17th century, and then increasingly French ones in the 18th, in particular Saint-Domingue (now Haiti).
Cuba was able to break into the sugar game as a latecomer thanks to a number of factors, but the key one to the island’s runaway success as the new king of sugar was the Haitian Revolution. With the collapse of Haiti’s plantation exports of cotton, coffee, and sugar, suddenly a huge market share was up for grabs. Cuba outcompeted on sugar, Brazil on coffee, and the US - of course - on cotton. These countries did not specialize and overtake competitors just because of the Haitian Revolution (arguably the soils of Haiti were reaching exhaustion even before the revolution began), but it did accelerate the process a great deal, while also preventing the new black republic from returning to Atlantic agro-export markets for decades.
Thought about in this light, the post-Cold War Cuban economy is, in many ways, ironically a ‘return’ to the ‘second’ colonial Cuban economic model. A massive black market dominates the economy and most of the population participates in a very active contraband trade, despite repeated sanctions and warnings by the state. The service economy rises, this time to service tourism rather than foreign trade, but still reminiscent all the same. Finally, an economic model built on considerations that were more political and military than they were about spurring development and prosperity at home dominates the policy vision of those deciding - without consultation - what domestic life should look like.
Instead of being an engine birthing a new economy, the post-Cold War economic models of Fidel and now Raúl have become stagnant, trapped in the mire of political decisions that its people cannot contest without danger to themselves and their loved ones. Sugar is dead and a return to it will not bring prosperity; there’s a reason most sugar exporters of the past have moved on to tourism or other crops, like oil palms. What’s clear is that the status quo cannot go on. Not if a better tomorrow is to come, anyway.