Cuba’s Presidential Palace was built during the presidency of Mario García Menocal (1913-1921) and enabled by a massive surge in sugar prices caused by the collapse of beet sugar production in Europe and armies’ reliance on sugar for soldier rations during World War I. As the globe’s largest sugar producer, Cuba entered a near decade-long economic expansion dubbed “The Dance of the Millions.” Benefits accrued, as they had since colonial times, to already rich sugar barons, but they also endowed a new political class of white, former officers of the Cuban independence wars who controlled government with unique opportunities for graft and investment. President Menocal was one of them. Having founded the Cuban American Company with Texas Republican Congressman R.B. Hawley during the first US Military Occupation (1898-1901), Menocal’s sugar mill and plantation “Chaparra” had grown to be the largest sugar estate in the world. Eager to offset his unpopular anti-labor policies and mass deportation of foreign workers, Menocal justified the opulence of the executive residence as evidence of Cuba’s sovereignty and prosperity, despite a measurable spike in poverty—even among his own plantation workers. President Menocal’s net worth also ballooned from less than a million dollars in 1913 to well over eight by the end of his rule. Museum of the Revolution (former Presidential Palace), Havana, 2016.
