24 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION
farmers, most of the workers were tied to sugar and tobacco.
These two crops were rapidly converting Cuban agriculture
to a cash-crop production and latifundia. The next largest
group of Cubans were employed as domestic servants or in
transportation. Matters of social position rather than income
still influenced Cubans in selecting careers: in 1907 Cuba had
more doctors than butchers, more lawyers than civil engineers.
The relatively stable distribution of people in occupations
does not reflect, however, the changes in rural and urban life
Cuba experienced from 1868 to 1898. The economic destruc
tiveness of the guerrilla warfare, the abolition of slavery, and
the transformation of the sugar business reduced the number
of farm owners and produced a new urban class of chronically
unemployed former slaves and small landholders living in the
towns. This sector, often in competition with the Spanish for
jobs, became a source of unrest, often demanding government
jobs. The desire for official posts was national; one typical
town of five hundred had a mayor, a secretary, a town doctor,
and four policemen, drawing salaries from $35 to $75 a month
for little work.
Racially, Cuba was a white country (70 per cent) with an
easy attitude about admission to whiteness. The country, how
ever Hispanic culturally, had its own racial tensions. Cuban
history throughout the nineteenth century left a legacy of
fear among the whites of race war and Africanization. In
reality, by 1900 the white population, already the majority,
was increasing more rapidly than the Negro. Slavery, how
ever, left a tradition of social and economic inferiority that
the Cuban Negro found difficult to reconcile with his im
portant role as a soldier in the Army of Liberation. Among
the upper class, such phrases as "they've a touch of the tar
brush" or "his hair is not so nice" reflected a blurred but real
color line. Even within the lower class, mulattos did not
associate freely with Negroes. White and black Cubans lived
"together, but not mixed."^6
By 1900 the economic structure of Cuba had begun to
take the form it retained for the next sixty years.^7 The major