CUBA 231
The economic collapse was followed by a military
disaster: the War of the Pacifi c. Despite heroic resis-
tance, Peru suffered a crushing defeat at the hands
of a Chilean state that enjoyed more advanced
economic organization, political stability, and the
support of British capitalists. The war completed
the work of economic ruin begun by the depres-
sion. The Chileans occupied and ravaged the eco-
nomically advanced coastal area: they levied taxes
on the hacendados; dismantled equipment from
the haciendas and sent it to Chile; and sent troops
into the sierra to exact payment from hacendados,
towns, and villages. Their extortions infuriated the
native peasantry. Led by General Andrés Cáceres,
they began to wage an effective guerrilla war of
attrition against the Chilean occupiers. The 1883
Treaty of Ancón fi nally ended the war.
Cuba
Because of its distinctive colonial past, Cuba’s
nineteenth-century development differed markedly
from that of most other Latin American countries.
For three centuries after Christopher Columbus
landed in 1492, the island served primarily as a
strategic stopover for the Spanish treasure fl eet.
Largely isolated from expanding transatlantic mar-
kets and without precious metals or a large in-
di genous population to exploit, Cuba remained a
neglected, sparsely populated outpost of the em-
pire. The island’s inhabitants engaged, for the most
part, in small-scale farming for domestic consump-
tion. Unlike the sugar-producing islands of the
Caribbean, at the end of the seventeenth century
Cuba had few slaves (its population of African de-
scendants numbered 40,000, only one-tenth that
of Haiti), many of whom worked in nonagricul-
tural occupations, often as skilled craftsmen.
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE:
THE BITTER HARVEST OF KING SUGAR
The second half of the eighteenth century, how-
ever, had brought profound economic and social
change as Cuba was transformed into a classic
case of monoculture—an area dependent on the
production and export of a single crop for its eco-
nomic livelihood. Spurred by the short-lived Brit-
ish occupation of Havana in 1762 and further
stimulated by the growing U.S. market produced
by independence in 1783, the island experienced
a commercial awakening. Most important, Cuba
developed into a major sugar producer and slave
importer in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolu-
tion of the 1790s, which ruined that island as a
sugar producer (until then, it had been the world’s
leader). During the next half-century, sugar pro-
duction in Cuba skyrocketed, and nearly 600,000
enslaved Africans arrived on its shores. From
1774 to 1861, the island’s population leaped from
171,620 to 1,396,530, 30 percent of whom were
of African descent.
Initially, the transfer to sugar did not stimulate
the creation of the latifundio because much of the
land converted to sugar was the underused acreage
of large cattle haciendas. Moreover, many farmers
did not change over to sugar, preferring instead to
produce coffee and tobacco, which then enjoyed
high prices resulting from the abolition of the royal
monopoly on these commodities. Furthermore,
the sugar mills themselves stimulated demand for
livestock (to turn the mills) and food crops for the
slaves. During the fi rst decades of the nineteenth
century, the number of farm proprietors increased
markedly, and from their ranks came the leaders of
Cuban society for the next century.
By the turn of the century, the economic boom
that had followed the destruction of Haitian sugar
production ended because other Caribbean islands
expanded and initiated production in response to
the same stimuli, thereby creating an enormous
glut on the market. Just as the industry recovered
from this setback, diplomatic maneuvering dur-
ing the Napoleonic wars closed U.S. ports. Shortly
thereafter, two new challenges to the Cuban
economy arose: the introduction of beet sugar in
Europe and the British campaign to end the slave
trade. (England forced Spain to end the trade in
1821.) Further impediments resulted from the
restrictions imposed by Spanish hegemony: high
tariffs, scarce and expensive credit, and the disrup-
tions brought on by the Spanish American wars of
independence.