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Statistical and Documentary: Sugar

CHAPTER XXVIII. NATURAL RICHES AND NATIVE CHARMS OF CUBA. The Cultivation of Sugar Cane--Picture of a Cuban Garden--The Southern Cross--Cuba as Eden--Sugar Making--Tobacco Raising--The Forests and Fruits--Beauty of the Nights--Cuba Compared with New York--The Precious Woods--Mountains and Rivers--Solid Encyclopaedical Information--The Cry of a Poor Man.

THE cultivation of sugar cane has been the most interesting, because peculiar and important, of the industries of the Island, and there is a most pleasing account of it in "Cuba Past and Present," written by Maturin Ballou, in 1885, when cane culture was in its glory, midway between the two wars, and this picture is from his gallery. "Sugar cane is cultivated like Indian corn, which it also resembles in appearance. It is first planted in rows, not in hills, and must be hoed and weeded until it gets high enough to shade its roots. Then it may be left to itself until it reaches maturity. This refers to the first laying out of a plantation, which will afterwards continue fruitful for years, by very simple processes of renewal. When thoroughly ripe, the cane is of a light golden yellow, streaked here and there with red. The top is dark green, with long, narrow leaves depending, very much like those of the corn stalk, from the centre of which shoots upward a silvery stem, a couple of feet in height, and from its tip grows a white fringed plume of a delicate lilac hue. The effect of a large field at its maturity, lying under a torrid sun, and gently yielding to the breeze, is very fine, a picture to live in the memory ever after. "In the competition between the products of beet-root sugar and that from sugar cane, the former controls the market, because it can be produced at a cheaper rate, besides which its production is stimulated by nearly all of the European states, through the means of liberal subsidies both to the farmer and to the manufacturer. Beet sugar, however, does not possess so high a percentage of true saccharine matter as the product of the cane, the latter seeming to be nature's most direct mode of supplying us with the article. The Cuban planters have one advantage over all other sugar cane producing countries, in the great and inexhaustible fertility of the soil of the Island. For instance, one to two hogsheads of sugar to the acre is considered a good yield in Jamaica, but in Cuba three hogsheads are the average. Fertilizing of any sort is rarely employed in the canefields, while in beet-farming it is the principal agent of success. Though the modern machinery, as lately adopted on the plantations, is very expensive, still the result achieved by it is so much superior to that of the old methods of manufacture, that the small planters are being driven from the market. Slave labor cannot compete with machinery. The low price of sugar renders economy imperative in all branches of the business, in order to leave a margin for profit. "A planter informed the author that he should spread all of his molasses upon the cane fields this year as a fertilizer, rather than send it to a distant market and receive only what it cost. He further said that thousands of acres of sugar cane would be allowed to rot in the fields this season, as it would cost more to cut, grind, pack, and send it to market than could be realized for the manufactured article. Had the price of sugar remained this year at a figure which would afford the planters a fair profit, it might have been the means of tiding over the chasm of bankruptcy, which has long stared them in the face, and upon the brink of which they now stand. But with a more than average crop, both as to quantity and quality, whether to gather it or not is a problem. Under these circumstances it is difficult to say what is to become, financially, of the people of Cuba. Sugar is their great staple, but all business has been equally suppressed upon the Island, under the bane of civil wars, extortionate taxation, and oppressive rule. "The sugar cane yields but one crop a year. There are several varieties, but the Otaheitan seems to be the most generally cultivated. Between the time when enough of the cane is ripe to warrant the getting-up of steam at the grinding-mill, and the time when the heat and the rain spoil its qualities, all the sugar for the season must be made; hence the necessity for great industry on the large estates. In Louisiana the grinding lasts but about eight weeks. In Cuba it continues four months. In analyzing the sugar produced on the Island, and comparing it with that of the mainland--the growth of Louisiana--chemists could find no difference as to the quality of the true saccharine principle contained in each."