In the 1940s and early 1950s, during Cuba’s short-lived democratic age, Cuban sugar workers achieved major labor demands from an elected government. These included not only the legalization of negotiated union contracts but also government mediation of strikes. For permanent workers on both foreign and native-owned plantations, conditions improved. Still, until the consolidation of a Communist state under Fidel Castro after the Revolution of 1959, most cane-cutters (the majority of the labor force) found employment only four to five months of the year during the annual sugar harvest. The rest of the year, families in sugar areas struggled: people worked—often only to pay the cost of food—or starved. While Communism and the Soviet Union’s willingness to trade oil for sugar at five times the global price met most workers’ basic needs in sugar areas, cane harvesting remained unmechanized until the mid-1980s. This meant that when the Soviet Union fell and its ability to float Cuba’s social safety disappeared, relatively little development took place in Cuba’s isolated and enormous sugar estates. Technical improvements to sugar mills were rarely made. After 1993, the vast majority of sugar plantations shut down. Within a few years, Cuba began importing sugar from Brazil just to meet government rations of sugar that —from an outsider’s perspective in the 1990s—often substituted for food. Thus, the sight of a still-functioning sugar mill anywhere in Cuba was shocking. As every passenger noted when I took this picture from the back of a collective inter-provincial cab, the smokestack was actually emitting smoke. And as the taxi driver noted wryly, it was not on fire. Western Cuba, 1999.
