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Latin American two paragraph paper

As we see in this section, Galeano presents a side of sugar that we rarely see/hear or read about. I am particularly interested in your thoughts on Columbus planting the first cane in the Dominican Republic and later its spread to Cuba and the subsequent explosion of sugar thereafter throughout the Caribbean. This particular product has both benefited the world and destroyed entire communities (and all its lives in the path) according to Galeano. Important in this particular section is the transportation and spread of sugar “as king” and also the lives of sugar slaves who had a product as their master. This surely isn’t new information but (1) how can we understand slavery, particularly Latin American and Caribbean slavery in terms of sugar slaves (Galeano, 82). Also destroyed in this sugar rush was the Caribbean ecology and natural landscapes without recourse. (2) There’s a lot that we can talk about here as well.

This section of Galeano’s work is thick with information about a product that still causes so much damage today. How can we grapple its history in Latin America and the Caribbean as we still are involved with sugar today? Thinking about an answer to this and as you reflect on this section of the book, what do you think the relationship to sugar is now in these particular Latin American countries and Caribbean islands? Has the devastation of sugar slavery made a lasting impact that we can still see?

II. Take a moment to conduct some quick research about the production or existence of sugar in any of the places you read about and see what you come up with in terms of the latter set of questions here (ie current relationships to sugar). Please post a link for anything you find that’s relevant to your/our discussion.

King Sugar and Other Agricultural Monarchs

PLANTATIONS, LATIFUNDIA, AND FATE

Undoubtedly gold and silver were the main motivating force in the Conquest, but Columbus on his second voyage brought the first sugarcane roots from the Canary Islands and planted them in what is now the Dominican Republic. To the Admiral’s joy they took hold rapidly. Grown and refined on a small scale in Sicily, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands, and purchased in the Orient at high prices, sugar was so precious to Europeans that it figured in the dowries of queens. It was sold in pharmacies, weighed out by the gram. For almost three centuries after the discovery of America no agricultural product had more importance for European commerce than American sugar, Canefields were planted in the warm, damp littoral of Northeast Brazil; then in the Caribbean islands-Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Puerto Rico-and in Veracruz and the Peruvian coast, which proved to be ideal terrain for the “white gold.” Legions of slaves came from Africa to provide King Sugar with the prodigal, wageless labor force he required: human fuel for the burning. The land was devastated by this selfish plant which invaded the New World, felling forests, squandering natural fertility, and destroying accumulated soil humus. The long sugar cycle generated a prosperity as mortal as the

prosperity generated by-the silver and gold of Potosi, Ouro Preto, Zacatecas, and Guanajuato. At the same time, directly or indirectly but decisively, it spurred the growth of Dutch, French, English, and U.S. industry.

The demand for sugar produced the plantation, an enterprise motivated by its proprietor’s desire for profit and placed at the service of the international market Europe was organizing. Internally, however since it was to a considerable extent self-sufficient-the plantation was feudal in many important aspects, and its labor force consisted mainly of slaves. Thus three distinct historical periods-mercantilism, feudalism, slavery-were combined in a single socioeconomic unit. But in the constellation of power developed by the plantation system, the international market soon took the center of the stage.

Subordinated to foregn needs and often financed from abroad, the colonial plantation evolved directly into the present-day latifundio, one of the bottlenecks that choke economic development and condemn the masses to poverty and a marginal existence in Latin America today. The latifundio as we know it has been sufficiently mechanized to multiply the labor surplus, and thus enjoys an ample reserve of cheap hands, It no longer depends on the importation of African slaves or on the encomienda of Indians; it merely needs to pay ridiculously low or in-kind wages, or to obtain labor for nothing in return for the laborer’s use of a minute piece of land. It feeds upon the proliferation of minifundios–pocket-sized farms–resulting from its own expansion, and upon the constant internal migration of a legion of workers who, driven by hunger, move around to the rhythm of successive harvests.

The plantation was so structured as to make it, in effect, a sieve for the draining-off of natural wealth, and today the latifundio functions in the same way. Each region, once integrated into the world market, experiences a dynamic cycle; then decay sets in with the competition of substitute products, the exhaustion of the soil, or the development of other areas where conditions are better. The initial productive drive fades with the passing years into a culture of poverty, subsistence economy, and lethargy. The Northeast was Brazil’s richest area and is now its poorest; in Barbados and Haiti human antheaps live condemned to penury; in Cuba sugar became the master key for U. S. domination, at the price of monoculture and the relentless impoverishment of the soil.

And this has not been the role of sugar alone: the story has been the same with cacao, which made the fortunes of the Caracas Oligarchy; with the spectacular rise and fail of cotton in Maranho; with the Amazonian rubber plantations, which became the cemeteries of Northeastern workers recruited for a few pennies; with the devastated quebracho forests in northern Argentina and Paraguay; with Yucatan’s henequen plantations, where Yaqui Indians were sent for extermination. It is also the story of coffee, which advances leaving deserts behind it, and of the fruit plantations in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and the unhappy lands of Central America. Each product has come to embody the fate of countries, regions, and peoples; and mineral-producing communities have, of course, traveled the same melancholy road. The more a product is desired by the world market, the greater the misery it brings to the Latin American peoples whose sacrifice creates it. The area least affected by this iron law has been Rio de la Plata, feeding the international market with its hides, meat, and wool; yet even it has been unable to break out of the cage of underdevelopment.

HOW THE SOIL WAS RAVAGED IN NORTHEAST BRAZIL

Because they discovered precious metals first, the Spaniards only began raising sugar in their colonies-initially in Santo Domingo, then in Veracruz, Peru, and Cuba-as a secondary activity. Brazil, on the other hand, became the world’s largest sugar producer and remained so until the middle of the seventeenth century, Portugal’s Latin American colony was also the chief market for slaves; native workers, always scarce, were rapidly killed off by the forced labor, and sugar needed thousands of hands to clear and prepare the ground, to plant, harvest, transport, grind, and refine the cane. Brazilian colonial society flourished in Bahia and Pernambuco as a sub-product of sugar until the discovery of gold moved its center to Minas Gerais.

The Portuguese Crown granted lands in usufruct to Brazil’s first big landlords. The feats of conquest proceeded in tandem with the organization of production. Twelve “captains” received by written grant the whole of the vast unexplored territory, to be exploited in the king’s service. However, the business was mostly financed by Dutch capital

and thus became more Flemish than Portuguese. Dutch entrepreneurs not only participated in establishing sugar estates and importing slaves; they also picked up the crude sugar in Lisbon, refined it, sold it in Europe, and pocketed a third of its value In profits. In 1630 the Dutch West India Company invaded and conquered the northeast coast of Brazil and took over direct control of sugar production. To multiply their profits, the sources of sugar had to be multiplied, and the company offered the British in Barbados all facilities to start massive production in the Antilles. It brought Caribbean colonists to Brazil to acquire technical and organizational knowledge. When the Dutch were finally thrown out of the Brazilian Northeast in 1654, they had already laid the foundations for intense and ruinous competition by Barbados. They had taken slaves and cane-roots there, had set up sugar estates, and had provided all the implements. Brazilian exports plummeted to half of what they had been, and sugar prices were halved by the end of the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, Barbados’s black population increased tenfold in a few decades. The Antilles were nearer to the European market, and Barbados developed superior techniques and offered virgin and while Brazilian soil was wearing out. The crisis in the sugar- growing Northeast was also precipitated by serious slave revolts and by the gold boom to the south, which robbed the plantations of labor. The crisis was definitive: it has dragged itself painfully down the centuries into our time.

Sugar had destroyed the Northeast. The humid coastal fringe, well watered by rains, had a soil of great fertility, rich in humus and mineral salts and covered by forests from Bahia to Ceara. This region of tropical forests was turned into a region of savannas. Naturally fitted to produce food, it became a place of hunger. Where everything had bloomed exuberantly, the destructive and all-dominating latifundio left sterile rock, washed-out soil, eroded lands. At first there had been orange and mango plantations, but these were left to their fate, or reduced to small orchards surrounding the sugar mill-owner’s house, reserved exclusively for the family of the white planter. Fire was used to clear land for canefields, devastating the fauna along with the flora: deer, wild boar, tapir, rabbit, pacas, and armadillo disappeared. All was sacrificed on the altar of sugarcane monoculture.

At the end of the sixteenth century Brazil had no less than

120

sugarmills worth some £2 million, but the’ it masters, owners of the best lands, grew no food. They imported it, just as they imported an array of luxury articles which came from overseas with the slaves and bags of salt. Abundance and prosperity went hand in hand, as usual, with chronic malnutrition and misery for most of the population. Cattle were relegated to deserts far inland from the humid coastal zone to the sertao which, with two head of cattle to the square mile, supplied (and still supplies) tough, tasteless, and always scarce meat.

A legacy of those colonial days which continues is the custom of eating dirt. Lack of iron produces anemia, and instinct leads Northeastern children to eat dirt to gain the mineral salts which are absent from their diet of manioc starch, beans, and-with luck-dried meat. In former times this “African vice” was punished by putting muzzles on the children or by hanging them in willow baskets far above the ground. (An English traveler, Henry Koster, attributed this custom to the contact the white children had with little blacks “who infect them with this African vice.”

+In various ways the Northeast is the victim of internal colonialism for the benefit of the industrialized south. Within the Northeast, the sertao region is subordinated to the sugarbelt which it supplies, and the latifundios in their turn are subordinated to processing plants that industrialize sugar production. The ancient institution of the individually owned sugar estate is in crisis: the central mills have devoured the plantations.)

The Brazilian Northeast is today the most underdeveloped area in the Western hemispheres As a result of sugar monoculture it is a concentration camp for 30 million people-on the same soil that produced the most lucrative business of the colonial agricultural economy in Latin America. Today less than a fifth of Pernambuco’s humid zone is used for growing sugar; the rest is not used at all.’ The big sugarmill owners, who are also the biggest planters of cane, permit themselves this luxury of waste. It is not in the Northeast’s arid and semi-arid interior that food conditions are worst, as is erroneously believed. The sertao, a desert of stones and sparse vegetation, has periods of hunger when the scorching sun produces drought and the semblance of a lunar landscape, forcing the people to flee and sowing crosses along the roadsides. But in the humid littoral–that coastal fringe still so ironically known as the “forest zone” in tribute to the remote past arid to the pitiful remnants of forestation surviving from centuries of sugar–

hunger is endemic. Where opulence is most opulent, there–in this land of contradictions–misery is most miserable; the region nature chose to produce all foods, denies all. The sugar latifundio, a structure built on waste, must still import food from other areas, particularly from the center and south, at escalating prices. The cost of living in Recife is the highest in Brazil, well above Rio de Janeiro. Beans cost more in the Northeast than in Ipanema, the capital city’s most luxurious beach resort. The price of half a kilo of manioc starch equals the wage an adult sugar-plantation worker receives for working from sunrise to sunset: if he complains, the foreman summons the carpenter to measure the man for the length and width of the boards that will be needed. In large areas the owner’s or administrator’s “right of the first night” for each girl is still effective. A third of Recife’s population lives in miserable hovels; in one district, Casa Amarela, more than half the babies die before they are a year old. Child prostitution–girls of ten or twelve sold by their parents–is common in Northeastern cities. Some plantations pay less for a day’s work than the lowest wage in India. A United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report in 1957 said that in the area of Victoria, near Recife, protein deficiency in children produces a weight loss 40 percent worse than is generally found in Africa. Many plantations still operate private prisons, but, as Rene Dumont notes, “those who are responsible for murder by undernourishment are not locked inside, since they are the keepers of the keys.” 2

Pernambuco now produces less than half as much sugar as the state of Sao Paulo, and has a far lower per hectare yield; but Pernambuco’s inhabitants, densely concentrated in the humid zone, depend on sugar for their livelihood, while Sao Paulo contains the greatest industrial center in Latin America. In the Northeast not even progress is progressive, for it is in the hands of a few owners. The food of the minority is the hunger of the majority. Beginning in 18

the sugar industry I was substantially modernized as big central mills were installed, and the absorption of land by latifundios progressed alarmingly, sharpening the hunger of the area. In the 1950s, booming industrialization increased the consumption of sugar in Brazil itself. This stimulated Northeastern production, but without causing any rise in the per hectare yield, New lands of inferior quality were planted to cane, and sugar devoured still more of the few food-producing areas. Turned into a wage-worker, the

peasant who had previously tilled his small plot experienced no benefit, since he did not earn enough money to buy what he had once produced. As usual, the expansion expanded hunger.

THE DEVASTATION OF THE CARIBBEAN

“You believe perhaps, gentlemen,” said Karl Marx in 1848, “that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugarcane nor coffee trees there.”‘ The international division of labor was not organized by the Holy Ghost but by men-more precisely, as a result of the world development of capitalism.

It was the fate of the “sugar islands”–Barbados, the Leewards, Trinidad- Tobago, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Santo Domingo-to be incorporated one by one into the world market and condemned to sugar until our day. Grown on a grand scale, sugar spreads its blight on a grand scale and today unemployment and poverty are these islands’ permanent guests. Cuba also continues to depend on the sale of sugar, although the agrarian reforms of 1959 sparked an intensive diversification of the economy which has ended seasonal unemployment. Cubans no longer work only during the five or so months of the sugar harvest, but for twelve months in the continuous job of building a new society.

Barbados was, starting in 1641, the first Caribbean island where sugar was grown for bulk export, although the Spaniards had planted cane earlier in Santo Domingo and Cuba. It was, as we have seen, the Dutch who introduced sugar into the little British island; by 16

Barbados had 800 plantations and more than 80,000 slaves. Occupied vertically and horizontally by the developing latifundio, Barbados suffered no better fate than the Brazilian Northeast. It had previously produced a variety of crops on small holdings: cotton and tobacco, oranges, cows and pigs. Canefields devoured all this and devastated the dense forests in the name of a glorious illusion. The island soon found that its soil was exhausted, that it was unable to feed its population, and that it was producing sugar at uncompetitive prices.

By this time sugar cultivation had spread to the Leeward Islands, to Jamaica, and to the Guianas on the South American mainland. Jamaica entered the eighteenth century with ten times more slaves than white colonists. Its soil too was soon exhausted. In the second half of the century the world’s best sugar was being raised on the spongy coastal plains of Haiti, a French colony then known as Saint Domingue. Northern and western Haiti became a human antheap: sugar needed hands and more hands. In 17

the colony brought in 27,000 slaves; in the following year, 40,000. Revolution broke out in the fall of 17

and in one month, September, 200 sugar plantations went up in flames; fires and battles were continuous as the rebel slaves pushed France’s armies to the sea. Ships sailed containing ever more Frenchmen and ever less sugar. The war spilt rivers of blood, wrecked the plantations, and paralyzed the country, and by the end of the century production had fallen to almost nothing. By November 1803 almost all of the once flourishing colony was in ashes and ruins. The Haitian revolution had coincided–and not only in time–with the French Revolution, and Haiti bore its share of the international coalition’s blockade against France: England controlled the seas. Later, as its independence became inevitable, Haiti also had to suffer blockade by France. The U.S. Congress, yielding to French pressure, banned trade with Haiti in 1806. In 1825 France recognized its former colony’s independence, but only in exchange for a huge cash indemnity. General Leclerc had written to his brother-in-law Napoleon in 1802, soon after taking prisoner the slave armies’ leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, “Here is my opinion about this country: all the blacks in the mountains, men and women, must be suppressed, keeping only the children under twelve; half the blacks in the plains must be exterminated, and not a single mulatto with epaulets must be left in the colony.”4 The tropics took their revenge on Leclerc: “Gripped by the black vomit,” and despite the magical incantations of Pauline Bonaparte, he died without carrying out his plan.( Alejo Carpentier has written a Fine novel about this fascinating period of Haitian history, The Kingdom of This World (1957). It contains a perfect recreation of the Caribbean adventures of Pauline and her husband.) But the cash indemnity was a millstone around the necks of those independent Haitians who survived the bloodbaths of the successive military

expeditions against them. The country was born in ruins and never recovered: today it is the poorest in Latin America.

The crisis in Haiti produced the sugar boom in Cuba, which quickly became the world’s top producer. Cuban production of coffee, another item in great demand overseas, was also stimulated by the collapse of Haitian production, but sugar won the monocultural race: in 1862 Cuba had to import coffee from abroad. A respected member of the Cuban “sugarocracy” held forth on “the proven advantages that can be obtained from another’s misfortune.”5 After the Haitian rebellion, sugar prices in European markets topped all records, and by 1806 Cuba had doubled both its mills and its productivity.

SUGAR CASTLES ON CUBA’S SCORCHED EARTH

The British had taken Havana briefly in 1762. The island’s rural economy was then based on small tobacco plantations and on cattle ranching; Havana, a military bastion, had craftsmen with advanced skills, an important foundry manufacturing cannon, and Latin America’s first shipyard for building merchant and war ships on a big scale. Eleven months sufficed for the British occupiers to introduce as many slaves as would otherwise have entered in Fifteen years, and from that time on the Cub an economy was shaped by the foreign need for sugar: slaves produced it for the world market and its bounteous surplus value was enjoyed by the local oligarchy and by imperialist interests.

Cuban sugar historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals describes with eloquent data the headlong advance of sugar in the years following the British occupation, Spain’s commercial monopoly had in fact been blown apart, and all brakes on the entry of slaves had been removed. The sugarmills absorbed everything, men and land. To the mills went shipyard and foundry workers and the countless small artisans who had contributed decisively to the development of industry. Small peasants growing tobacco in the vegas or fruit in the orchards, victims now of the canefields’ brutally destructive advance, also turned to sugar production. Extensive planting relentlessly reduced the soil’s fertility; sugarmill towers multiplied in the Cuban countryside and each one needed more and more land. Fire devoured tobacco vegas, forests, and pasturelands.

Dried meat, a Cuban export a few years earlier, was by 17

arriving in large quantities from abroad and was an import from then on.( The Rio de la Plata meatpacking plants were already in operation. Argentina and Uruguay (then without separate existence and not so named) had adopted their economies to the massive export of dried and salted meat, hides, fats, and tallows. Brazil and Cuba, the nineteenth century’s two great slave centers, were fine markets for dried meat, a very cheap food easily transported and warehoused since it did not go bad in the tropical heat. Cuba was the first market for Uruguayan meat–then shipped in thin, dry slices–at the end of the eighteenth century. Cubans still call dried meat “Montevideo,” but Uruguay stopped selling it to Cuba in 19

when they joined the OAS anti- Cuban bloc, thus idiotically losing their last market for the product.6) The shipyard and foundry languished, tobacco production plummeted; the slaves of sugar put in a workday of up to twenty hours. On smoking lands the “sugarocracy” consolidated its power. In the late eighteenth century euphoria of sky-high international prices, speculation ran riot: land prices went up twenty times in Guines; in Havana, eight times the legal rate of interest was paid; and throughout Cuba the fees for baptisms, burials, and masses rose in proportion to the soaring prices of blacks and oxen.

Early chroniclers told of traveling across all of Cuba in the shade of giant palms and through leafy forests abounding in mahogany, cedar, and ebony. Cuba’s precious woods may still be admired in the tables and window frames of the Escorial and in the doors of the royal palace in Madrid, but in Cuba the sugarcane invasion sent the best virgin forests up in smoke. In the same years it was destroying its own timberlands, Cuba became the chief purchaser of U.S. timber. The extensive plunder-culture of sugarcane meant not only the death of the forest but also, in the long run, the death of the island’s fabulous fertility. (Until recently, palanqueros operated on the Rio Sagua. According to Fraginals, “They carry a long pole with an iron tip. With this they prod the riverbed until they strike a piece of wood…. Thus, day after day, they bring up from the river the remains of the trees that sugar felled. They live from the corpses of the forest.” )With forests surrendered to the flames, erosion soon did its work on the defenseless soil and thousands of streams dried up. The present-day per hectare yield from sugar plantations in Cuba is more than three times lower than in Peru and four and one-half times lower than in Hawaii. Irrigation and fertilization of the land are priority tasks for the Cuban Revolution. Large and small hydraulic dams are multiplying,

fields are being irrigated, and fertilizer is being scattered over lands weak from centuries of punishment.

The “sugarocracy” piled up their fraudulent fortunes while reinforcing Cuba’s dependence. Among those who savagely devastated Cuba’s fertile soil were persons of refined European culture who could spot a genuine Brueghel and afford to buy it; they returned from frequent Paris trips with Etruscan vases and Greek amphorae, Gobelin tapestries and Ming screens, landscapes and portraits by the most fashionable British artists. I was startled to find in the kitchen of a Havana mansion an enormous strongbox with a secret combination in which a countess used to protect her table service. Up until 1959 it was not factories, but sugar castles that were built on the island: sugar installed and removed dictators, gave or denied jobs to workers, decided the rhythm of the “dance of the millions”–the 1919-1921 boom period–and of the terrible crises. The city of Trinidad is today a resplendent corpse. It collapsed, never to rise again, with the collapse of sugar prices in 1857.( Fraginals has perceptively noted that the names of sugar estates started in the nineteenth century reflected the rise and fall of the sugar curve: “Hope” “New Hope” “Audacious,”

“Gamble”: “Hopeful, “Conquest,” “Confidence,” Good Results”: “Wit’s End,” “Woe,” “Disenchantment.” There were four estates named— with premonition— “Disenchantment.”) In the mid-nineteenth century it had forty sugarmills producing 700,000 arrobas of sugar. Poor tobacco-farming peasants had been displaced by force and violence, and meat for the district–which had also raised cattle and had once exported meat–was being bought abroad. There was a flowering of colonial- style palaces with furtively shadowed porticos, chandeliers dripping crystal in high-ceilinged salons, Persian carpets, minuets faintly breaking the velvet silence, ormolu mirrors reflecting the graces of buckle-shod, bewigged caballeros. Great marble and stone skeletons, proud silent bell towers, and Spanish carriages invaded by grass remain today as testimony to all this. Trinidad became known as “the city of the ‘hads’” because its white survivors always talked of past days when they “had” power and glory.

When the Sierra Maestra guerrilleros took power, Cuba’s destiny was still tied to sugar prices. “A people that entrusts its subsistence to one product alone commits suicide,” the national hero Jose Marti’ had prophesied. When sugar stood at $.22 a pound in 1920, Cuba beat the world record in per capita export- -even surpassing England–and had

Latin America’s highest per capita income. But in December of that year the price fell to $.04 and a crisis of hurricane force descended in 1921: many sugarmills went bankrupt–to be bought up by U.S. interests–as did all the Cuban and Spanish banks, including the Banco Nacional itself. Only the branches of U.S. banks survived. The 1921 disaster had been brought on by the fall in sugar prices on the U.S. market, and from the United States came a prompt credit of $50 million. On the heels of the credit came General Enoch Crowder who, under the pretext of controlling the use of the funds, became Cuba’s de facto governor. Thanks to his good offices the Machado dictatorship came to power in 1924, but the Great Depression of the 1930s lay ahead for this bloody regime with Cuba paralyzed by a general strike. The U.S. crisis of 1929 could not but have a fierce impact on so dependent and vulnerable an economy as Cuba’s: the price of sugar sank well below $.01 by 1932, and in three years the value of exports fell by

percent. At that time the unemployment index would have been hard to match in any other country.

What happened to prices was repeated in volume of exports. The United States lowered import duties on Cuban sugar in exchange for similar privileges for U.S. exports to Cuba, but such “favors” only consolidated Cuba’s dependence. By 1948 Cuba had recovered its quota to the point of supplying one-third of the U.S. sugar market, at prices lower than U.S. producers received but higher and more stable than those in the international market. Sugar production was arbitrarily limited by Washington’s needs. The 1925 level of some 5 million tons remained the average through the 1950s; dictator Fulgencio Batista took power in 1952 on the heels of the biggest harvest in Cuban history–over 7 million tons–with the mission of tightening the screws, and in the following year production, obedient to the demand in the north, fell to 4 million tons.( The director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s sugar program declared soon after the Revolution: “Since Cuba has left the scene, we cannot count on that country, the world’s biggest exporter, which always had enough reserves to supply our market when need arose.”7) When Batista fell in 1959, Cuba was selling almost all its sugar to the United States. As Marti said and Che Guevara quoted at the OAS Punta del Este conference in 1961, “The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade

in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country, and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one.”

THE CUBAN REVOLT AGAINST THE STRUCTURE OF IMPOTENCE

Geographical proximity and the advent of beet sugar production in France and Germany during the Napoleonic wars made the United States the chief customer for Antillean sugar. By 1850 the United States was absorbing one- third of all Cuban trade, selling it more and buying more from it than Spain, whose colony it was; the Stars and Stripes fluttered from more than half the ships arriving at the island. A Spanish traveler found U.S.-made sewing machines in remote Cuban villages in 1859. The main streets of Havana were paved with New England granite.

At the dawn of the twentieth century one could read in the Louisiana Planter. – “Little by little the whole island of Cuba is passing into the hands of U.S. citizens, which is the simplest and safest way to obtain annexation to the United States.” There was already talk in the Senate of a new star in the flag; with Spain’s defeat, General Leonard Wood governed the island. At the same time the Philippines and Puerto Rico dropped into the United States’ lap.( Puerto Rico, another sugar factory, remained a prisoner. From the U.S. standpoint, Puerto Ricans are not good enough to live in a country of their own but are good enough to die in Vietnam for a country which is not theirs. In proportion to population, the “Free Associated State” of Puerto Rico has more soldiers fighting in Southeast Asia than the rest of the United States. Puerto Ricans resisting compulsory military service in Vietnam are sent to U.S. penitentiaries. Other humiliations inherited from the invasion of 18

and blessed by law (the law of the U.S. Congress) are added to service in the U.S. armed forces. Puerto Rico is symbolically represented in the Congress, being without vote and virtually without voice. In exchange for this right: colonial status for an island that before the U.S. occupation had its own currency and carried on prosperous trade with the principal markets. Today the currency is the dollar and customs duties are fixed in Washington, where everything connected with the island’s external and internal trade is decided. The same for foreign relations, transport, communications, wages, and work conditions. U.S, federal courts sit in judgment on Puerto Ricans; the local army is part of the U.S. army. Industry and commerce are in the hands of U.S. private interests. The emigration of Puerto Ricans has threatened to make denationalization complete: poverty has driven more than a million to New York hoping to improve their lot at the cost of losing their national identity.

There they form a subprolerariat which piles up in the most sordid slums.) “They have been conferred upon
us by the war,” said President McKinley, including Cuba in his remarks, “and with God’s help and in the name of the progress of humanity and civilization, it is our duty to respond to this great trust.” In 1902 Toma Estrada Palma had to renounce the U.S. citizenship he had acquired while living there in exile; the US. occupation forces made him the first president of Cuba. In 1960 the former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, told a Senate subcommittee: “Until Castro came to power, the United States had such an irresistible influence in Cuba that the U.S. ambassador was the country’s second personage, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president.”

In 1954 a young revolutionary lawyer accurately prophesied, in his testimony to a court trying him for the attack on the Moncada barracks, that history would absolve him: “Cuba,” he said in his resounding defense plea, “continues to be a producer of raw materials. We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron to import plows.”8 Cuba bought not only automobiles, machinery, chemical products, paper, and clothing, but also rice and beans, garlic and onions, fats, meat, and cotton, all from the United States. Ice cream came from Miami, bread from Atlanta, and even luxury suppers from Paris. The country of sugar imported nearly half the fruit and vegetables it consumed, although only a third of its population had regular jobs and half of the sugar estate lands were idle acres where nothing was produced. Thirteen U.S. sugar producers owned more than 47 percent of the total area planted to cane and garnered some $1

million from each harvest. The subsoil wealth–nickel, iron, copper, manganese, chrome, tungsten–formed part of the United States’ strategic reserves and were exploited in accordance with the varying priorities of U.S. defense and industry. In 1958 Cuba had more registered prostitutes than mine workers and a million and a half Cubans were wholly or partly unemployed.

The country’s economy moved in step with its sugar harvests. The purchasing power of Cuban exports between 1952 and 1956 was no greater than it had been thirty years earlier, although foreign currency was much more needed. In the 1930s, when the crisis deepened the economy’s dependence instead of helping to break it, newly installed factories were actually dismantled to sell to other countries. When the Revolution triumphed on the first day of 1959, Cuba’s industrial

development was poor and sluggish, over half the production was concentrated in Havana, and the few technologically modern factories were managed by remote control from the United States. A Cuban economist, Regino Boti, co- author of the Sierra guerrilleros’ economic theses, cites the example of a Nestle’s affiliate producing condensed milk in Bayamo: “When there was a breakdown, the technician simply phoned Connecticut and told them what he thought had gone wrong. He was told at once what to do about it and he simply followed instructions, without having to bother his head about theory. If this did not do the trick, a plane would arrive four hours later with a team of specialists. After nationalization, we could no longer phone for help, and the few technicians who might have been able to deal with minor faults had gone.”9 This illustrates precisely what problems the Revolution faced when it embarked on the adventure of converting the colony into a fatherland.

Cuba was crippled by its dependent status, and walking on its own feet has not been easy. Half of its children did not go to school in 1958, but, as Fidel Castro has said many times, the ignorance was much broader and more serious than mere illiteracy. The big campaign of 1961 mobilized an army of young volunteers to teach all Cubans to read and write, and the results astonished the world: according to UNESCO’s Department of Education, Cuba now has the lowest percentage of illiterates and the highest percentage attending primary and secondary school in Latin America. But the inherited curse of ignorance cannot be overcome overnight–or in twelve years. A lack of efficient technicians, administrative incompetence and disorganization of production, and a bureaucratic fear of creative imagination and decision still obstruct the development of socialism. Yet despite the whole structure of impotence forged by four and one-half centuries of oppression, Cuba is being reborn with an enthusiasm that never flags: against obstacles it matches its strength, its gaiety, and its audacity,

IN CUBA, SUGAR WAS THE KNIFE, IMPERIALISM THE ASSASSIN

“Is building on sugar better than building on sand?” Jean-Paul Sartre asked himself when he was in Cuba in 1960.

On the pier in the port of Guayabal, which exports sugar in bulk, pelicans wheel over an enormous shed. Entering it, I am astonished to see a golden pyramid of sugar. As hatches open to run the unsacked cargo down into the ships below, more cascades of gold-sugar newly brought from the mills–pour in through openings in the roof. It glints and sparkles in beams of sunlight. This warm mountain, too big for my eyes to take in, is worth some $4 million. Here, I think to myself, is summed up all the euphoria and drama of the record harvest of 1970,

A harvest which aspired–but despite superhuman effort, was not able–to reach 10 million tons. Yet the story behind the golden cascade is a much longer one. I think about the Francisco Sugar Company (in which Allen Dulles was a director), where I have passed a week listening to stories of the past and seeing the birth of the future. . . . Josefina, daughter of Caridad Rodriguez, who studies in a classroom that was a barracks cell, the exact place where her father was held and tortured before he died; Antonio Bastidas, the seventy-year-old black who, early one morning this year, seized the lever of the siren with both hands, dancing in the air because the mill had overfilled its quota and yelling, “Shit, man, we done it!”–and no one would take Antonio’s clenched hands off the lever while the siren, which had awakened the community, was awakening all Cuba. Stories of eviction , bribery, murder, hunger, of strange occupations which unemployment–obligatory more than six months of every year– engenders: hunting crickets in the fields, for example.

But those who died did not do so in vain: Amancio Rodriguez, for one, riddled with bullets by strikebreakers at a meeting, had angrily refused a blank check from the boss; his comrades, when they went to get his body, found he owned no underwear or socks to be buried in. Or Pedro Plaza, arrested at age twenty, who guided a truckful of soldiers over mines he had himself laid and was blown up with the truck and the soldiers. And so many more, in this area and all over: “Here,” an old sugar worker told me, “the people have a great love for martyrs–but only after they’re dead. Before, there’s nothing but complaints.” It wasn’t an accident, I think to myself, that Fidel Castro recruited three-quarters of his guerrilleros from among the campesinos, the sugar workers; nor that Oriente province has throughout Cuba’s history been the biggest source of both sugar and rebellion. I understand the

accumulated rancor that made the Revolution, after the big harvest of 1961, decide to take revenge on sugar, the living memory of humiliation. Was it also Cuba’s fate? Did it then become a penitence? Could it now be a lever, a catapult for economic development?

When a pardonable impatience set in, the Revolution destroyed many canefields and sought to diversify agriculture overnight. It didn’t fall into the traditional error of dividing the latifundios into unproductive small farms, but every socialized farm proceeded to make sudden and excessive variations in its crops. Yet there had to be large-scale imports to industrialize the country, raise agricultural production, and satisfy many consumer needs which, in redistributing wealth, the Revolution enormously increased. Without big sugar harvests, where would the currency for these imports come from? The development of mining–particularly nickel–requires large investments, and these are being made; fishery production, also needing enormous investments, has risen eight times thanks to the growth of the fleet; ambitious plans for citrus fruit production are being implemented, but the interval of years between planting and harvesting demands patience. The Revolution, after discovering that it had confused the knife with the assassin, turned sugar, which had been responsible for underdevelopment, into an instrument of development. There was no alternative but to use the fruits of monoculture and dependence, born of Cuba’s incorporation into the world market, to break the spine of that monoculture and dependence. No longer was the income earned by sugar to go to consolidate the structure of submission.( The stable sugar price guaranteed by the socialist countries has played a decisive role in this respect, as has the breaking of the U.S.- organized blockade by intensive trading with the West European countries. A third of Cuba’s exports earn dollars–that is, convertible currency; the rest is on a barter basis with the Soviet Union and the ruble zone. This system of trading creates certain difficulties:while Soviet turbines for thermoelectric installations are of excellent quality, like all Soviet-made heavy equipment, this is not true of consumer goods produced by its light or medium-sized industry.)

Imports of machinery and industrial installations have risen by 40 percent since 1958; the economic surplus generated by sugar has been mobilized to develop basic industries and to see that neither lands nor workers are condemned to idleness. Cuba had 5,000 tractors and 30,000 automobiles when the Batista dictatorship fell. Today it has 50,000

tractors–although they are to a large extent wasted because of organizational deficiencies–and nothing remains of that fleet of automobiles, mainly luxury models, except a few specimens fit for scrap-iron. The cement industry and electrical plants are growing with extraordinary speed; big fertilizer factories created by the Revolution have enabled Cuba to use five times more fertilizer than in 1958. Reservoirs built all over the island today contain seventy-three times as much water as was available in 1958, and Cuba has made a seven- league-boot advance in areas under irrigation. New highways throughout Cuba have broken what once seemed to be the eternal isolation of many regions. Holstein bulls, brought in to increase the meager milk production from Cebu cattle, have produced 800,000 cross-bred cows by artificial insemination.

Much progress–but still not enough–has been made in the mechanization of sugarcane cutting and loading, mainly using Cuban inventions. A new work system is being organized, with difficulty, to replace the old one which could not survive the changes brought by the Revolution. Professional macheteros, canecutters who are prisoners of sugar, are an extinct species: for them too, the Revolution meant freedom to choose other less grueling work, and for their children the chance of scholarships to study in the cities. Unavoidably, the sugar workers’ liberation has resulted in serious upsets in the economy. In the 1970 harvest Cuba had to use three times as many workers as before, mainly volunteers or soldiers or people from different jobs, thereby harming other rural and urban activities–the harvesting of other products, the work-rhythm in the factories. Here one must bear in mind that in a socialist society, unlike in a capitalist one, workers are not motivated by fear of unemployment or by avarice. Other drives–solidarity, collective responsibility, awareness of the duties and rights that move a man beyond selfishness–must be brought into play. And the conscience of a whole people is not changed in a moment. When the Revolution came to power most Cubans, according to Fidel Castro, were not even anti-imperialists.

Cubans became radicalized along with their Revolution as challenges and responses, blows and counter-blows between Havana and Washington followed one upon the other, and as the Revolution proceeded to turn its promises of social justice into solid facts, It built 170 new

hospitals and as many polyclinics, and made medical care free. It multiplied by three the number of students enrolled at all levels and also made education free; more than 300,000 children and youths benefit today from scholarships, and boarding schools and kindergartens have proliferated. A large part of the population pays no rent and no one pays for water, light, public telephones, funerals, or sporting events. Spending on social services increased five times in a few years. But now that everyone has education and shoes, necessities multiply geometrically and production can only grow arithmetically. Cuba has been compelled to escalate its exports, and sugar continues to be its major resource. Many products are in short supply: In 1970, fruit and refrigerators and clothing. Queues, part of the daily routine, are not solely due to disorganized distribution. The essential cause of scarcity is the new abundance of consumers: the country now belongs to everyone, consumption is by all, not just a few. Thus it is scarcity of an opposite kind to that in other Latin American countries. The Revolution is indeed living through the hard times of transition and sacrifice. The Cubans themselves have learned that socialism is built with clenched teeth and that revolution is no evening stroll. But after all, if the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.

The Revolution is forced to sleep with its eyes open, and in economic terms this also costs dearly. Constantly harassed by invasion and sabotage, it does not fall because–strange dictatorship!–it is defended by a people in arms. The expropriated expropriators do not give up. The brigade that landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 was not only made up of former Batista soldiers and policemen, but also of the previous owners of more than 370,000 hectares of land, nearly 10,000 buildings, seventy factories, ten sugarmills, three banks, five mines, and twelve cabarets. Guatemalan dictator Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes provided training camps for the expedition in return, as he later admitted, for U.S. promises of cash (which was never paid) and an increase in the Guatemalan sugar quota in the U.S. market.

In 1965 another sugar country, the Dominican Republic, was invaded, this time–according to their commander, General Bruce Palmer–by 40,000 U.S. Marines ready “to stay indefinitely in this country in view of the reigning confusion.” The vertical drop in sugar prices had been a factor in setting off popular indignation; the people rose against

the military dictatorship and U.S. troops arrived promptly to restore order, They left 4,000 dead in battles fought by patriots, body to body, in a crowded Santo Domingo slum, between the Rio Ozama and the Caribbean.(After the invasion, President Lyndon johnson’s special envoy to the Dominican Republic was Ellsworth Bunker, the chairman of the National Sugar Refining Company. National Sugar’s interests in this small country were safeguarded under Bunker’s attentive eye: the occupation troops withdrew, leaving in power, after very democratic elections, Joaquin Balaguer, Trujillo’s right arm throughout his brutal dictatorship. The Dominicans had fought in the streets and on rooftops, with sticks, machetes, and guns, against the foreign forces’ tanks, bazookas, and helicopters for the return to power of constitutionally elected President Juan Bosch, who had been overthrown by a military coup. History plays derisively prophetic games. On the day when Bosch began his brief presidency, after thirty years of Trujillo tyranny, Lyndon Johnson, then vice-president, brought his government’s official gift to Santo Domingo: it was an ambulance.) The Organization of American States–which has the memory of a donkey, never forgetting where it eats–blessed the invasion and supplied it with new forces. The germ of another Cuba had to be exterminated.

FROM THE SACRIFICE OF THE SLAVES IN THE CARIBBEAN WERE BORN JAMES WATT’S STEAM ENGINE AND GEORGE WASHINGTON’S CANNON

Che Guevara said that underdevelopment was a dwarf with an enormous head and a bloated stomach: its spindly legs and stubby arms do not fit with the rest of the body. In yesterday’s Havana fashionable avenues glittered and putted with Cadillacs, and luscious starlets undulated to the rhythms of Lecuona’s famous band in the world’s largest cabaret; meanwhile in the Cuban countryside only one in every ten peasants ever drank milk, barely 4 percent ate meat, and the wages of three out of five (according to the National Economic Council) were three to four times lower than the cost of living.

But sugar did not only produce dwarfs. It also produced giants, or at least contributed generously to their growth. The sugar of tropical Latin America gave powerful impetus to the accumulation of capital for English, French, Dutch, and U.S. industrial development, while at the same time mutilating the economy of Northeast Brazil and the Caribbean islands and consummating the historic ruin of Africa. The fulcrum

of the triangular trade–manufactures, slaves, sugar–between Europe, Africa, and America was the traffic in slaves for sugar plantations. As Auguste Cochin wrote: “The story of a grain of sugar is a whole lesson in political economy, in politics, and also in morality.”

West African tribes fought among themselves to add prisoners of war to their reserves of slaves. They were in Portugal’s colonial orbit, but when the slave trade boomed the Portuguese, lacking ships and industrial articles to offer in exchange, became mere middlemen between African potentates and slaver captains of other nations. The English were the champions in buying and selling human flesh until it ceased to be convenient for them. The Dutch, however, had longer experience in the business–Charles V had given them a monopoly in shipping slaves to the Americas before England obtained the right to introduce slaves into the colonies. As for France, the “Sun King” Louis XIV shared with the king of Spain half the profits of the Guinea Company, formed in 1701 to facilitate the slave trade to the Americas; and his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the architect of French industrialization, had good reason to describe the slave traffic as “recommended for the progress of the national merchant marine.”10

Adam Smith said that one of the principal effects of the discovery of America “has been to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.”11 According to Sergio Bagu, the most potent force for the accumulation of mercantile capital was slavery in the Americas; and this capital in turn became “the foundation stone on which the giant industrial capital of modern times was built.” The New World revival of Greco-Roman slavery had miraculous qualities: it multiplied the ships, factories, railroads, and banks of countries that were not originally involved in Africa or–with the exception of the United States–in the fate of the slaves crossing the Atlantic. From the dawn of the sixteenth to the dusk of the nineteenth centuries, many millions of Africans–no one knows how many crossed the ocean; what is known is that they greatly exceeded the number of white emigrants from Europe, although many fewer survived. From the Potomac to the Rio de la Plata, slaves built the houses of their masters, felled the forests, cut and milled the sugarcane, planted the cotton, cultivated the cacao, harvested the coffee and tobacco, and were entombed in the mines. How many Hiroshimas did these successive

exterminations add up to? As an English planter in Jamaica remarked, “It’s easier to buy niggers than to breed them.” Caio Prado estimates that up to the beginning of the nineteenth century between 5 and 6 million Africans arrived in Brazil alone, and that Cuba was then as big a slave market as the whole Western hemisphere had been before.

Back in 1562 Captain John Hawkins had smuggled 300 blacks out of Portuguese Guinea. Queen Elizabeth was furious: “It was detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven upon the undertakers,” she cried.12 But Hawkins told her that in exchange for the slaves he had a cargo of sugar, hides, pearls, and ginger in the Caribbean, and she forgave the pirate and became his business partner. A century later the Duke of York was branding the initials “DY” on the left buttock or breast of each of the 3,000 blacks his concern annually took to the “sugar islands.” The Royal African Company, whose shareholders included Charles II, paid 300 percent in dividends, although only 46,000 of the 70,000 slaves it shipped between 1680 and 16

survived the crossing. On the voyage many Africans died of epidemics or malnutrition; others committed suicide by refusing to cat, hanging themselves by their chains, or throwing themselves into a sea bristling with sharks’ fins.

Slowly but surely England broke Holland’s slave-trade hegemony. The South Sea Company was the chief beneficiary of the asiento, the royal monopoly on the slave trade which Spain had conceded to England, and leading figures in British politics and finance were connected with the company. Its business topped all others, agitated the London stock exchange, and set off reckless speculation. Traffic in slaves raised the shipping center of Bristol to the rank of Britain’s second city and made Liverpool the world’s greatest port. Ships sailed with cargoes of duly blessed weapons, cloth, gin and rum, baubles and colored glass, the means of payment for Africa’s human merchandise and for the sugar, cotton, coffee, and cacao of American colonial plantations. The British established their reign over the seas. At the end of the eighteenth century, Africa and the Caribbean were providing work for 180,000 textile workers in Manchester; Sheffield produced the knives, Birmingham produced 150,000 muskets a year. African chiefs received the products of British industry and delivered the human cargoes to slaver captains. This provided them with new weapons and plenty of liquor to embark on the next manhunts in the villages. They also supplied ivory, wax, and

palm oil. Many of the slaves came from forest areas and had never seen the sea; they mistook its roaring for that of some underwater beast waiting to devour them, or (according to a slavetrader of the period) believed, not entirely without reason, that “they are carried like sheep to the slaughter and that Europeans are fond of their flesh… ”13 The cat-o’-nine-tails could do little to contain the Africans’ desperate suicides.

The “bundles” who survived the hunger and disease, the weeks of lying crammed together below decks, were exhibited in rags–mere skin and bones– in the public square after being paraded through colonial streets to the sound of bagpipes. Those arriving too exhausted could be fattened up in the slave barracks before showing them to buyers; the sick ones were left to die on the piers. Slaves were sold for cash or on three-year credit. The ships sailed back to Liverpool carrying various tropical products: in the early eighteenth century three-quarters of the cotton used by the British textile industry came from the Antilles, although Georgia and Louisiana later became its chief sources; by mid-century there were 120 sugar refineries in Britain.

At that time an Englishman could live on ₤6 a year; Liverpool slave merchants garnered more than ₤1.1 million a year in the Caribbean alone, not including their fat profits from the additional trade. Ten big concerns controlled two-thirds of the traffic. Liverpool installed a new system of docks; more, longer, and heavier ships were constantly being built. Silversmiths offered “silver padlocks and collars for niggers and dogs,” elegant ladies paraded about with monkeys in embroidered jackets and child slaves in turbans and ballooning silk trousers. An economist described the slave trade as the basic and fundamental principle of all the rest, like the mainspring of the machine which sets every cogwheel in motion.” Banks proliferated in Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, London, and Glasgow; Lloyds piled up profits insuring slaves, ships, and plantations. From the beginning, London Gazette announcements advised that fugitive slaves should be returned to Lloyds. Slave-trade profits financed the building of Britain’s Great Western railway and of industries such as the Welsh slate factories. Capital accumulated in the triangular trade made possible the invention of the steam engine: James Watt was subsidized by businessmen who had made their fortunes in that trade.14

Early in the nineteenth century, Britain became the leader in the anti- slavery campaign. British industry needed international markets with more purchasing power, which led it to preach the gospel of wages. But the introduction of wages in Britain’s Caribbean colonies gave renewed advantage to Brazilian sugar, with its comparatively lower costs from using slave labor. (The first law expressly banning slavery in Brazil was not Brazilian, It was–and not by accident- -English. The British parliament voted it on August 8, 1845.) The British fleet now attacked the slavers, but the traffic to supply Cuba and Brazil continued growing. Before a British ship could reach a pirate ship, the slaves were thrown into the sea; all that remained on board were the smell and the laughing captain on deck. Repression of the traffic raised prices and further pyramided profits. By the middle of the century slavers were selling vigorous slaves, whom they had got for an old rifle, for more than $600 a head in Cuba.

The little Caribbean islands had been far more important to Britain than its colonies to the north: Barbados, Jamaica, and Monserrat were forbidden to make so much as a needle or a horseshoe for themselves. But the situation was quite different in New England, and this facilitated both its economic development and its political independence. In New England the slave trade gave birth to a large part of the capital that produced the U.S. industrial revolution. In the middle of the eighteenth century Northern slave ships carried barrels of rum to Africa from Boston, Newport, and Providence; they exchanged the rum for slaves, sold the slaves in the Caribbean, and from there brought molasses to Massachusetts, where it was distilled and converted into rum, completing the cycle. The best Antillean rum, “West Indian Rum,” was not even made in the Antilles. With capital obtained from this trade in slaves, the Brown brothers of Providence installed the foundry that provided George Washington with guns for the American Revolution. Caribbean sugar plantations, condemned as they were to cane monoculture, were not the dynamic center of development for the “thirteen colonies” solely because of the impetus the slave trade gave to naval industry and to the New England distilleries; they also provided a large market for the export of foodstuffs, timber, and sugarmill implements, lending economic viability to the farm and budding factory economy of the North Atlantic. Ships built in the colonists’ yards carried to the Caribbean

massive cargoes of fresh and smoked fish, grain, beans, flour, fats, cheese, onions, horses and oxen, candies and soap, textiles, pine, oak, and cedar for sugar boxes (Cuba had the first steam saw in Hispanic America but no timber to cut), and barrel staves, hoops, rings, and nails.

The whole process was a pumping of blood from one set of veins to another: the development of the development of some, the underdevelopment of others.

THE RAINBOW IS THE ROAD BACK TO GUINEA

From Santo Domingo, a lawyer named Alonso Zuazo reported to Charles V in 1518: “Fears of a possible rising by the blacks are groundless; there are widows living tranquilly with eight hundred slaves in Portuguese islands; it is all a matter of how they are handled. I found on arrival here some cunning niggers, and others who had taken to the Woods; I thrashed some, cut off the ears of others, and there has been no more trouble.” Four years later the first slave rising in the Americas broke out: the slaves of Diego Columbus, son of the discoverer, started the revolt and ended on gallows lining the sugarmill lanes. Other rebellions followed, in Santo Domingo and then in all the Caribbean sugar islands. A couple of centuries after the Diego Columbus uprising, at the other end of the island, runaway slaves fled to the Haitian mountains and there reconstructed African life, growing their food, worshiping their gods, practicing their ancient customs. For the people of Haiti the rainbow still symbolizes the road back to Guinea–in a ship with a white sail. In Dutch Guiana (Surinam) communities of Djukas, descendants of slaves who fled into the forest, have survived for three centuries across the Courantyne River. In these villages “obeah shrines like those in Guinea can be seen, ceremonial dances are performed that could take place in Ghana, and the people talk with drums, which are made like Ashanti drums.”15 The first big revolt in Guiana occurred one hundred years after the flight of the Djukas: the Dutch recovered the plantations and burned the slave leaders in slow fires, but in Brazil a little before the Djuka exodus, fugitive slaves had organized the black kingdom of Palmares in the Northeast, and throughout the eighteenth century had successfully resisted dozens of military expeditions sent to

suppress them, first by the Dutch and then by the Portuguese. Assaults by thousands of soldiers were fruitless against the guerrilla tactics which, until 1693, made the refuge invulnerable. The independent kingdom of Palmares–a call to rebellion, a banner of liberty–was organized as a state, similar to the many that existed in Africa in the seventeenth century. It extended from near Cape Santo Agostinho in Pernambuco to the northern Rio Sao Francisco zone in Alagoas, an area one-third the size of Portugal and surrounded by dense, wild forests. The ruling chief was elected from among the wisest and most skillful: the man, of greatest prestige and success in war or command. When the sugar plantation was at its height of omnipotence, Palmares was the one corner of Brazil where agriculture was being diversified. Guided by their own experience or that of their ancestors in African savannas and forests, the blacks raised corn, sweet potatoes, beans, manioc, bananas, and other foods. The colonial troops, assigned to bring back the men who had crossed the sea in chains and deserted the plantations, believed–and not without reason–that the destruction of these crops was their main purpose.

The abundance of food in Palmares contrasted with its lack in coastal areas at the zenith of the sugar prosperity. The slaves who had won liberty defended it ably and bravely because they shared its fruits: land in the black state was held in common and no money circulated. No slave rebellion in world history lasted as long as that in Palmares: Spartacus’s rebellion, which shook the most important slave system of ancient times, lasted eighteen months.16 For the final onslaught the Portuguese Crown mobilized the biggest army seen in Brazil until the colony became independent much later. No fewer than 10,000 people defended the last bastion of Palmares; the survivors were beheaded, thrown from precipices, or sold to merchants in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Two years later the chief Zumbi, whom the slaves believed to be immortal, was betrayed and captured. He was surrounded in the forest and his head cut off. And rebellions continued. Not long afterward Captain Bartolomeu Bueno do Prado returned from the Rio das Mortes with trophies of victory over another slave rising. He brought 3,900 pairs of ears in his horses’ saddlebags.

In Cuba, too, there were risings. Some slaves committed mass suicide, mocking their masters, as Fernando Ortiz has put it, “with

their eternal strikes, their unending flight to the other world.” They thought they would thus be brought back to life, body and soul, in Africa. By mutilating the corpses so they would return to life castrated, maimed, or decapitated, the masters dissuaded many from killing themselves. Around 1870, according to a recent account by a Las Villas 100-year-old slave who took to the woods as a youth, blacks in Cuba no longer chose suicide. A magic chain gave them power and they “flew through the sky and returned to their own land”; or they lost themselves in the mountains because “everyone wearied of life, and the ones who got used to it were broken in spirit. Life in the forest was healthier.”17

The gods of Africa remained alive for the slaves, as did the nostalgia- nourished legends and myths of their lost fatherlands. In their ceremonies, dances, and incantations the blacks clearly expressed the need to affirm a cultural identity that Christianity denied, but the Church’s material stake in the exploitation they suffered must have been a factor also. In the early eighteenth century, while slaves convicted of crimes in British islands were crushed between cane-milling cylinders, and in French islands were burned alive or broken on the wheel, the Jesuit Antonil was offering Brazilian sugarmill owners kindly recommendations for the avoidance of excesses: “Administrators should under no circumstances be permitted to administer kicks in the belly to pregnant women nor beatings to the slaves, since anger may prevail over restraint and an efficient and valuable slave may be injured in the head and lost.”18 In Cuba, overseers applied their thongs of hide or hemp to the backs of pregnant females who had erred, but not before stretching them out with their bellies over a hole to avoid damaging “the little creature”; priests, who received 5 percent of sugar production as a tithe, gave Christian absolution; the overseer administered punishment like Jesus Christ castigating sinners. The apostolic missionary Juan Perpina y Pibernat published his sermons to the blacks: “My poor little ones! Be not afraid because as slaves you have so many burdens to bear! Your body may be enslaved, but your soul remains free to fly one day to the happy mansions of the chosen.” 19 (One Holy Thursday the Count of Casa Bayona decided to humiliate himself before his slaves. Inflamed with Christian fervor, he washed the feet of twelve blacks and invited them to dine with him at his table. It was in truth the last supper. Next day the slaves rebelled and set fire to the sugarmill. Their heads were stuck on 12 lances in the middle of the estate.)

The god of the pariahs is not always the same as the god of the system that makes them pariahs. Although the Catholic religion officially embraces

percent of the population of Brazil, black Brazilians today maintain their African traditions and keep alive their religious faith, often camouflaged behind Christian saints; cults of African origin are widely practiced by the oppressed, whatever their skin color. The same is true in the Antilles. The voodoo gods in Haiti, Cuba’s bembe, and Brazil’s umbanda and quimbanda are more or less the same, despite the greater or smaller transfiguration that rites and original gods have undergone through American naturalization. In the Caribbean and in Bahia the ceremonial chants are intoned in Nago, Yoruba, Congo, and other African languages. In the big city suburbs of southern Brazil, on the other hand, Portuguese predominates. But from the West African coast the gods of good and evil have endured throughout the centuries to become the avenging phantoms of the disinherited, the humiliated poor who chant in the slums of Rio de Janeiro:

Power of Bahia, Power of Africa, Divine power, Come to us, Come and help us.

PEASANTS FOR SALE

Brazil abolished slavery in 1 888, but it did not abolish the latifundio, and in the same year an eyewitness wrote from Ceara, in the Northeast: “The human cattle market was open as long as there was hunger, and there was no lack of buyers. Rare was the steamer in which large numbers of Ceara people were not shipped out.”20 Half a million Northeasterners emigrated to Amazonia, drawn by the rubber mirage, until the turn of the century; after that the exodus continued as periodic droughts devastated the sertao and “forest zone” sugar latifundios expanded in successive waves, In 1900, 40,000 drought victims left Ceara. They took

the road that everyone took at the time, north to the jungle. Later the direction changed: in our day Northeasterners emigrate to the center and south of Brazil. The drought of 1970 drove hungry multitudes into the cities of the Northeast. They plundered trains and stores, implored the saints to send rain, and clogged the roads. “Pernambuco state police,” said a wire service cable in April 1970, “last Sunday arrested in the municipality of Belem do Sao Francisco 210 peasants who were to be sold for $18 a head to rural landowners in Minas Gerais state.”21(In 1938 the pilgrimage of a cowhand over the parched roads of the sertao inspired one of the best novels in Brazilian literature. On cattle ranches in the interior, subordinated to coastal sugarmills, there has been no let-up in the scourge of drought and the effects continue the same. The world of Graciliano Ramos’s Barren Lives–in which the parrot imitates the dog’s bark because his masters have almost stopped using the human voice— remains intact.) The peasants came from Paraiba and Rio Grande do Norte, the two states most punished by drought. In June, statements by the federal police chief came over the teletype: no effective means of ending the slave traffic were available to him, and although ten investigations had been launched in recent months, the sale of Northeastern workers to rich landowners in other areas continues.

THE RUBBER CYCLE: CARUSO INAUGURATES A JUNGLE THEATER

Some authors estimate that in the period of the rise of rubber no less than half a million Northeasterners succumbed to epidemics, malaria, tuberculosis, or beriberi. Says one: “This grim charnel house was the price of the rubber industry.”22 Peasants with no nutritional reserves went from the dry lands to the swampy jungle, where fevers lay in wait for them. Packed into ships’ holds for the long journey, many anticlpated their fate by dying en route. Others did not even reach the ships. In 1878, 120,000 of Ceara’s 800,000 population headed for the Amazon and less than half got there; the rest collapsed from hunger or disease on the sertao trails or in the suburbs of Fortaleza. A year earlier one of the Northeast’s seven greatest droughts of the past century had begun.

Not only fevers awaited them in the jungle, but a work regime very similar to slavery. Guardias rurales posted along the riverbanks shot at fugitives. The pay was in kind–dried meat, manioc flour, lumps of

unrefined sugar, aguardiente–until the rubber worker paid off his debts, a miracle that rarely occurred. Employers had an agreement among themselves not to give jobs to workers who were in debt to other employers. Debts piled on debts. To the cost of transport from the Northeast were added the debts for work tools, machetes, knives, and eating bowls; and since the worker consumed food–and above all liquor, never a scarce commodity in the rubber forests–the longer he worked the higher his accumulated debt. The illiterate Northeasterners were at the mercy of the administrators’ conjuring tricks with the ledgers.

In 1770 J.B. Priestley had observed that rubber would erase pencil marks on paper, and seventy years later Charles Goodyear and the Englishman Thomas Hancock simultaneously discovered the process of vulcanizing rubber, making it flexible and impervious to temperature changes. By 1850 the wheels of vehicles were being sheathed in rubber. At the end of the century the automobile industry was born in the United States and Europe, and with it the consumption of great quantities of pneumatic tires. World demand for rubber soared. The rubber-tree was bringing Brazil a tenth of its export income in 1890, and by 1910 this had risen to 40 percent, making rubber sales almost equal to those of coffee, although coffee was then at the height of its prosperity. Most of the rubber production came from the Acre area, which Brazil had wrested from Bolivia after a lightning military campaign.( Some 75,000 square miles were lopped off Bolivia. In 1902 it got a £2 million indemnity and a railway line giving it access to the Madeira and Amazon rivers.)

With Acre in its possession, Brazil had almost all of the world’s rubber reserves. Prices were at their peak on the international market and it seemed that good times had come to stay. The rubber workers, of course, did not share in this, although it was they who went out from their huts each dawn, receptacles strapped on their backs, to bleed the giant Hevea brasiliensis trees. They made incisions in the trunks and in thick branches and the whitish, sticky latex dripped from the wounds, filling the cups in a couple of hours. At night the flat slabs of rubber which had accumulated in the administration center were cooked. The sour and revolting smell of rubber impregnated the city of Manaus, world capital of the rubber business. Manaus had 5,000 inhabitants in 1849; it had 70,000 in little more than half a century. There rubber magnates

built their extravagantly designed and sumptuously decorated mansions with precious Oriental woods, Portuguese majolicas, columns of Carrara marble, and furniture by French master cabinetmakers. The nouveau riche of the jungle had the most costly foods brought from Rio de Janeiro; Europe’s top couturiers cut their dresses and outfits; they sent their sons to study at British schools. The Amazonas theater, a baroque monument in triumphantly poor taste, is the chief symbol of that vertigo of wealth at the beginning of our century. Caruso navigated the river through the jungle to sing to Manaus’s inhabitants for a kingly fee on opening night; Pavlova, who was supposed to dance there, could not get beyond Belem but sent her apologies.

In 1913 sudden disaster hit Brazilian rubber. The world price fell to a quarter of the two shillings it had been three years earlier. The Far East had only exported four tons of rubber in 1900; in 1914 Ceylonese and Malay plantations poured over 70,000 tons onto the world market, and within five years their exports approached the 400,000-ton mark. By 1919 Brazil, which had had a virtual monopoly, was supplying only one-eighth of world consumption. A half-century later Brazil is buying more than half its rubber from abroad,

What happened? Back in 1873 Henry Wickham, an Englishman who owned rubber forests on the Rio Tapajoz and was known for his botanical manias, had sent sketches and leaves of the rubber tree to the director of Kew Gardens in London. He got an order for a quantity of seeds from the yellow fruit of Hevea brasiliensis. Since Brazil severely punished any leakage of seeds, he had to smuggle them out, which was not easy: ships were meticulously searched by the authorities. Then, as if under a magic spell, an Inman Line ship penetrated 1,200 miles further than usual into the interior of Brazil. On its return, Henry Wickham was aboard as a member of the crew. He had selected the best seeds after putting the fruit out to dry in a native village, and had put them in a locked cabin, wrapped in banana leaves and suspended on strings so that the ship’s rats could not get at them. The rest of the ship was empty. In the port of Belem, at the river’s mouth, Wickham invited the authorities to a grand banquet. The Englishman’s eccentricities were notorious–all Amazonia knew that he collected orchids–and he explained that on order from the English king he was carrying a collection of rare orchid bulbs to Kew Gardens. As the plants were very delicate

he had them in a hermetically sealed cabin at a special temperature: if it was opened the flowers would be ruined. Thus the seeds reached the Liverpool docks unscathed. Forty years later the British invaded the world market with Malayan rubber. The Asian plantations, skillfully developed from shoots grown at Kew Gardens, easily supplanted Brazilian production.

Amazonian prosperity vanished in a puff of smoke. The jungle closed back upon itself. Fortune hunters left for other parts and the luxurious camp disintegrated. The only people remaining, surviving as best they could, were the workers who had been brought from afar to make fortunes for others–and not even for Brazilians. For Brazil had merely responded to the siren song of world demand for raw materials, without itself participating in the real business of rubber–finance, trade, industrialization, and distribution. The siren fell mute until World War II gave a new but fleeting push to Amazonian rubber. The Allied powers desperately searched for supplies when the Japanese occupied Malaya: the Peruvian jungle was ransacked and the so-called Battle of Rubber once again mobilized Brazil’s Northeastern peasants.( Early in our century, rubber- forested mountains in Peru had held out the promise of a new El Dorado. In 1908 Francisco Garcia Calderon wrote in El Peru contempordneo that rubber was the great wealth of the future. In his novel The Green House, Mario Vargas Llosa reconstructs the feverish atmosphere in Iquitos and in the jungle, where adventurers robbed the Indians and each other. Nature had leprosy and other weapons with which to take its vengeance.) This time, according to an accusation made in the Congress when the “battle” ended, the victims of disease and hunger, whose bodies remained to rot among the rubber trees, numbered some 50,000.

The rubber boom and the rise of coffee growing involved big levies of Northeastern workers. But the government also uses its bottomless reserve of cheap labor for public works. The naked men who built the city of Brasilia almost overnight were Northeasterners transported like cattle to the wilderness site. Today this most modern of the world’s cities is surrounded by a great belt of poverty: when they finished their work, these people–known as candangos– were dumped in outlying hovels. There, always available for any task, 300,000 Northeasterners live off the splendid capital’s leavings.

The Northeasterners’ slave labor is now constructing the great trans- Amazonia highway that will cut Brazil in two, penetrating the jungle up

to the Bolivian border. The “march to the west,” as the plan is called, also involves an agricultural colonization project to extend “the frontiers of civilization”; each peasant will get ten hectares of land if he survives the tropical fevers. The Northeast contains 6 million landless peasants while 15,000 people own half of all the land. Agrarian reform is not carried out in the already occupied areas, where the latifundistas’ property rights remain sacred, but in the jungle. Thus a road for the latifundio’s expansion into new territory is being opened up by its victims, the flagelado, or “tormented ones,” of the Northeast. Without capital or implements, what is the use of ten hectares one to two thousand miles from consumer centers? One must conclude that the government’s real alms are quite different: to provide labor for the U.S. latifundistas who have bought or appropriated half the lands north of the Rio Negro, and also for U.S. Steel, which received Amazonia’s rich iron and manganese deposits from General Garrastazu Medici.( In October 1970 the Bishop of Para denounced to the president of Brazil the brutal exploitation of Northeastern workers by contractors for the trans-Amazonia highway. The government calls it “the work of the century.”)

CACAO PLANTERS LIT THEIR CIGARETTES WITH 500,000-REIS BILLS

For a long time Venezuela was identified with cacao, a native South American plant. Venezuelans, as Domingo Rangel says, have been made to sell cacao and distribute foreign trinkets in their own lands.23 The cacao oligarchs made up a “Holy Trinity of backwardness,” along with moneylenders and traders. Cacao coexisted with indigo, sugar, tobacco, and a few mines, and cattle-raising on the plains, but the people correctly baptized as “Gran Cacao” the slave-owning oligarchy in Caracas, which supplied cacao to Mexico’s mining oligarchy and to the Spanish metropolis, thus using black labor to enrich itself. A coffee era began in Venezuela in 1873; coffee, like cacao, needs sloping lands or warm valleys. Despite this competition, cacao continued to expand, invading the humid lands of Carupano. Venezuela remained an agricultural country condemned to the cyclical rise and fall of coffee and cacao prices;

the two products created the capital that enabled landlords, merchants, and moneylenders to live as wasteful parasites.

Then, in 1922, the country suddenly became a fountain of oil, and oil has reigned without interruption ever since. The black gold finally gushed forth, justifying, four centuries late, the fantasies of the Spanish conquistadors: searching in vain for the king who bathed in gold, they had become mad enough to confuse a little Maracaibo village with Venice and the fetid coast of Paria with earthly paradise.

The last decades of the nineteenth century marked the rise of European and U.S. gluttony for chocolate. The industry’s progress lent great impetus to Brazilian cacao and to production in the old Venezuelan and Ecuadorean plantations. Cacao made its entrance onto the Brazilian economic stage at the same time as rubber, and like rubber it gave work to Northeastern peasants, Sao Salvador, now Bahia, on Todos os Santos bay, once capital of Brazil and of sugar and one of Latin America’s most important cities, revived as the cacao capital. In our time latifundios south of Bahia–from the Reconcavo region to the state of Espirito Santo, between the littoral lowlands and the mountain chain along the coast–still supply raw material for a good part of the world’s chocolate consumption. Like sugarcane, cacao means monoculture, the burning of forests, the dictatorship of international prices, and perpetual penury for the workers. The plantation owners, who live on the Rio de Janeiro beaches and are more businessmen than farmers, do not permit a single inch of land to be devoted to other crops. Their managers normally pay wages in kind–jerked beef, flour, beans; when paid in cash, the peasant receives the equivalent of a liter of beer for a whole day’s work, and must work a day and a half to buy a can of powdered milk.

For some time Brazil was favored in the international market, but from the outset Africa offered serious competition. By the 1920s the Gold Coast (now Ghana) had won the top position as a world cacao supplier: the British had developed cacao plantations in their colony on a large scale with modern methods. Brazil fell back to second place, and years later to third. But there was more than one period when no one would have believed that the fertile lands of southern Bahia were destined for mediocrity. Unused throughout the colonial period, the soil yielded prodigally: peons split the pods with their knives, collected the beans, and loaded them into donkey-drawn carts to be taken to the

grinders; it became necessary to fell ever more forests, to open up new clearings and conquer new territory with machete and gun. The peons knew nothing of prices or markets. They did not even know who ruled Brazil-up until not long ago one could still meet hacienda workers who were convinced that King Pedro II was still on the throne. The cacao masters rubbed their hands together: they knew, or thought they knew. Chocolate consumption grew, and with it prices and profits. The port of Ilheus, from which almost all the cacao was shipped, became known as “Queen of the South,” and although it is languishing today, the small but massive palaces which the hacendados furnished with the greatest luxury and the worst taste may still be seen there. Jorge Amado wrote several novels about it. He recreates one of the high-price periods thus: “Ilheus and the cacao zone swam in gold, bathed in champagne, slept with French ladies from Rio de Janeiro. At the Trianon, the city’s, most chic cabaret, Colonel Maneca Dantas lit cigarettes with 500,000-reis bills, repeating the gesture of all the country’s rich fazendeiros during the previous rises in coffee, rubber, cotton, and sugar prices.”(In Brazil the title of “colonel” is conferred with the greatest ease on old-established latifundistas and, by extension, on all important persons. The quoted passage comes from Jorge Amado’s novel Sao Jorge dos Ilheus (1946). From another novel, Cacao (1935): “Not even the children touched the cacao fruit. They were afraid of those yellow berries, so sweet on the inside, which enslaved them to this life of breadfruit and dried meat.” For, after all, “cacao was the great senhor feared even by the colonel.” In still another novel, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1959), a character speaks of Ilheus in 1925, pointing a categorical finger: “In the north of the country there exists no more rapidly progressing city.” Ilheus today is not even the shadow of what it was.) With the rise in price, production increased; then prices fell. Conditions became more and more unstable and land kept changing hands. The era of “beggar millionaires” began, as plantation pioneers yielded to exporters, who took over the lands for payment of debts.

In barely three years, from 1959 to 1961–to give but one example the international price of the Brazilian cacao bean fell by one third. Since then the tendency to rise has opened the door of hope a crack, but the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) predicts a short life for the upward curve. (Referring to the improvements in cacao and coffee prices, ECLA says they are relatively transitory and result largely from occasional harvest setbacks.24) To keep their chocolate cheap, the big cacao consumers–the United States, Britain, West Germany,

Holland, France–stimulate competition between African cacao and cacao from Brazil and Ecuador. Controlling prices as they do, these nations bring on periods of depression which put cacao workers back on the road. The unemployed look for trees to sleep under and green bananas to fool their stomachs: one product they certainly don’t eat is the fine chocolate that Brazil actually imports from France and Switzerland. Chocolate costs more and more; cacao less and less. Between 1950 and 1960 Ecuador’s cacao sales rose more than 30 percent in volume but only 15 percent in value. The remaining 15 percent was a gift from Ecuador to those rich countries which, in the same period, sent it their industrial products at escalating prices. Ecuador’s economy depends on the sale of bananas, coffee, and cacao, three food products highly subject to price fluctuations. According to official data, seven of every ten Ecuadoreans suffer from basic malnutrition, and the country has one of the highest death rates in the world.

CHEAP HANDS FOR COTTON

Brazil is the fourth largest cotton-producing country, Mexico the fifth. More than one-fifth of all cotton consumed by the world’s textile industries comes from Latin America. At the end of the eighteenth century, cotton had become the most important industrial raw material in Europe; England multiplied its purchases of the fiber by five in thirty years. The spinning frame invented by Arkwright–at the same time that Watt was patenting his steam engine–and Cartwright’s later development of the mechanical loom gave textile manufacturing a decisive push and provided the cotton plant with eager overseas markets. The cotton euphoria brusquely awakened the port of Sao Luiz do Maranhao from a long tropical siesta previously interrupted only by the arrival of a couple of ships a year. Now black slaves streamed onto the north Brazilian plantations and some 200 ships a year, carrying a million pounds of raw cotton, sailed from Sao Luiz. The economic crisis in mining at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave cotton an abundance of slave labor; with the exhaustion of the gold and diamond supply in the south, Brazil seemed to revive in the north. The port flourished, producing enough poets to become known as the Athens of

Brazil, but since no one in the Maranhao region bothered to raise food, hunger entered along with prosperity. Sometimes there was only rice to eat. The story ended as it had begun: suddenly. Large-scale cotton production on southern United States plantations, which had better $oil and machines for cleaning and baling, lowered prices by two-thirds and Brazil dropped out of the race. Prosperity returned when the Civil War interrupted U.S. supplies, but did not last long. Between 1934 and 1939, Brazilian cotton production grew impressively, from 125,000 to more than 320,000 tons; then the United States flooded the world market with its surpluses and prices slumped again.

The United States’ agricultural surpluses are, as we know, the result of fat subsidies to its producers; it spills the surpluses out across the world at dumping prices as part of its foreign aid program. Cotton was Paraguay’s chief export until the ruinous competition of U.S. cotton displaced it in the market, and Paraguayan production has fallen by 50 percent since 1952, (In the same way Uruguay lost the Canadian market for its rice, and the wheat of Argentina, once the world’s granary, virtually vanished from international markets.) The United States’ dumping of cotton has not affected the imperial hold of a U.S, firm, Anderson, Clayton & Co., over this product in Latin America, or interfered with U.S. purchases, through the firm, of Mexican cotton for resale to other countries.

World trade of Latin American cotton nevertheless remains lively thanks to its extremely low production costs. Even reality-concealing official figures betray the wretched standards of pay for actual work. In Brazil it is done either for hunger wages or on a serf basis. In Guatemala, plantation owners boast of paying 19 quetzals (about $10) a month, most of it in kind at prices they themselves determine. Mexican migrant workers, moving from harvest to harvest at $1.50 a day, suffer from underemployment and consequent under nutrition. The lot of Nicaraguan cotton workers is much worse, and Salvadorans, who supply cotton to Japanese textile industries, consume fewer calories and proteins than the hungry peasants of India.

In Peru’s economy cotton is the second agricultural source of foreign currency. Jose Carlos Mariategui has noted how foreign capitalism, in its constant search for land, labor, and markets, came to control Peru’s export crops by foreclosing the mortgages of debt-delinquent

landowners. When General Velasco Alvarado’s nationalist government came to power in 1968, less than one-sixth of the land suitable for intensive cultivation was being used, per capita income was fifteen times less than in the United States, and consumption of calories was among the world’s lowest. But cotton production, like sugar, was still dictated by the same non-Peruvian criteria exposed by Mariategui. The best lands, those along the coast, belonged to U.S. enterprises or to landlords who, like the Lima bourgeoisie, were only nationals in a geographical sense. Five big concerns (two of which–Anderson, Clayton and Grace–are based in the United States) dominated the export of cotton and sugar and also produced them in their own “agro-industrial complexes.” Coastal sugar and cotton plantations–supposedly centers of prosperity and progress in contrast to sierra latifundios–paid hunger wages until the 1969 agrarian reform expropriated them and handed them over to the workers as cooperatives. According to the Inter-American Committee for Agricultural Development, the income for each member of a coastal worker’s family amounted to a mere $5 a month. 26

With thirty affliliates in Latin America, Anderson, Clayton has a monopoly: it not only sells cotton, but its network controls the financing and industrialization of the fiber and its derivatives, and also produces food on a large scale. In Mexico, for example, while the company owns no land, it still dominates cotton production and the 800,000 Mexicans who harvest the crop are in fact at its mercy, It buys the excellent Mexican cotton at a very low price, having previously extended credits to producers on the condition that they sell to it at the price with which it opens the market. In addition to advancing money, it supplies fertilizers, seeds, and insecticides; it reserves the right to supervise the application of Fertilizer, the sowing, and the harvesting. It fixes its own price for ginning the cotton, and uses the seeds in its oil, far, and margarine factories. In recent years the firm, not content with dominating the cotton business, has even broken into the candy and chocolate fields, recently buying the well-known firm Luxus.

Anderson, Clayton is also involved in coffee, and is the chief exporter of Brazilian coffee. It first took an interest in that business in 1950, and three years later it had dethroned the American Coffee Corporation. It is also the top producer of Brazilian foodstuffs and is one of the country’s thirty-five most powerful firms.

CHEAP HANDS FOR COFFEE

Some people rank coffee almost on a par with oil in its importance on the international market. At the beginning of the 1950s Latin America was supplying four-fifths of the coffee the world consumed; since then the competition of “robust” African coffee, lower in quality but also in price, has reduced Latin America’s share. Nevertheless, one-sixth of the currency the region obtains abroad now comes from coffee. Its price fluctuations affect fifteen countries south of the Rio Grande. Brazil is the world’s top producer, getting about half of its export income from coffee. El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Pica, and Haiti also largely depend on coffee, and it accounts for two- thirds of Colombia’s foreign exchange.

Coffee brought inflation to Brazil. Between 1824 and 1854 the price of a man doubled. At that Figure, and with their prosperous days a thing of the past, neither the north’s cotton producers nor the Northeast’s sugar producers could afford slaves. Brazil’s center of gravity moved south. In addition to slave labor, the coffee producers used European immigrants, who brought in 50 percent of the harvests in a sharecropping setup that still prevails in Brazil’s interior. Today’s tourists who drive through the woods for a swim at Tijuca beach are unaware that there, in the mountains surrounding Rio de Janeiro, big coffee plantations existed more than a century ago. Flanking the Sierra, these plantations spread toward the state of Sao Paulo in their endless pursuit of the humus of virgin lands. Toward the end of the century coffee planters, by then the new Brazilian social elite, sharpened their pencils and totted up their accounts: subsistence wages worked out cheaper than the purchase and maintenance of increasingly scarce slaves. With the abolition of slavery in 1888, the combined forms of feudal serfdom and wage labor that still persist were inaugurated. From then on an army of “free” farmhands would accompany coffee on its travels. The Rio Paraiba became the country’s richest area, to be quickly ruined by a plant whose destructive form of cultivation left forests razed, natural reserves exhausted, and general decadence in its wake. Previously virgin lands were pitilessly eroded as the plunder-march of coffee advanced, weakening the plants and making them vulnerable to diseases. The coffee plantation invaded the broad purple plateau west of Sao Paulo, converting

it into a “sea of coffee” with slightly less crude farming methods, and continued advancing westward. It reached the banks of the Parana where, facing the Mato Grosso savannas, it turned south; in recent years it has again moved west along the Paraguayan border.

Today Sao Paulo is the most developed state in Brazil, containing the country’s industrial center, but its coffee plantations still teem with “vassal inhabitants” who pay rent for their land with their and their children’s toil. In the prosperous post–World War I years the coffee growers, voracity virtually ended the system under which plantation workers could grow food crops on their own. Now they can only do it by paying rent in the form of wageless labor. The latifundista also uses contractual sharecroppers who are allowed to raise seasonal crops in return for planting still more coffee trees for his benefit. Four years after planting, when the branches are yellow with beans, the land has multiplied in value and it is time for the sharecropper to move on.

Coffee plantations pay even less in Guatemala than cotton plantations. On the southern slopes the owners claim to pay $15 a month to the thousands of natives who descend southward each year from the altiplano to sell their labor during the harvests. The plantations have private police forces: there, as the popular saying has it, “a man is cheaper than a mule,” and the repressive apparatus sees that he remains so. In the Alta Verapaz region the situation is even worse. The planters have no trucks or carts: they do not need them since it costs less to use the Indians’ backs,

Coffee is basic to the economy of El Salvador, a little country owned by a handful of oligarchical families: monoculture makes it necessary to import the beans–the people’s only source of protein corn, vegetables, and other foods the country traditionally produced. A quarter of all Salvadorans die of avitaminosis, or severe vitamin deficiency. As for Haiti, it has Latin America’s highest death rate, and more than half of its children are anemic. The wages Haiti requires by law belong-in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day.

In Colombia, where suitable slopes abound, coffee is king. According to a Time magazine report in 1962, only 5 percent of the price yielded by coffee in its journey from tree to U.S. consumer goes into the wages of the workers who produce it.27(The price breakdown is as follows: 40 percent for middlemen, exporters, and importers; 10 percent for taxes imposed by both governments; 10 percent for transport; 5 percent for publicity by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau; 30 percent for plantation owners; and 5

percent for workers’ wages.) In contrast to Brazil, most Colombian coffee is produced not by latifundios but by minifundios–small farms which tend to become increasingly smaller and smaller. Between 1955 and 1960, 100,000 new plantations appeared, most of them minute less than one hectare. Small and very small farmers produce three-quarters of the coffee exported by Colombia, and 96 percent of the plantations are minifundios. “Juan Valdes” smiles in the ads, but in fact atomization of the land is steadily forcing his living standards down and making it easier for the Federacion Nacional de Cafeteros, which represents the big landowners and virtually monopolizes trade in the product, to manipulate the situation. Farms of less than a hectare produce starvation incomes–an average of $ 130 a year.

BURN THE CROPS? GET MARRIED? THE PRICE OF COFFEE DICTATES A.LL

What’s this? An electroencephalogram of a lunatic? In 1889 coffee was worth two cents and six years later it had risen to nine; three years later it was down to four, five years after that to two. A typical period. The graph of coffee prices, like those of all tropical products, has always resembled a clinical epilepsy chart–more than ever when it shows the value of coffee in exchange for machinery and industrial products. Colombian President Lleras Restrepo complained that in 1967 his country had to pay fifty-seven sacks of coffee for a jeep that had only cost seventeen sacks in 1950. Figures offered at the same time by Brazilian Minister of Agriculture Herbert Levi were more dramatic: for a tractor, which had cost 70 sacks of coffee fourteen years earlier, Brazil now had to pay 350 sacks. When President Getulio Vargas put a bullet through his heart in 1954, the price of coffee played a role in the tragedy: “The crisis in coffee production came,” he wrote in his moving final testament, “and the price of our chief product went up. We tried to defend the price and the answer was such violent pressure on our

economy that we had to give in.” Vargas hoped that his blood would buy salvation for the Brazilian people.

If the 1964 coffee crop had been sold on the U.S. market at 1955 prices, Brazil would have received $200 million more. A drop of only one cent in the price meant a loss of $65 million to the combined producing countries. With the price falling continually between 1964 and 1968, the consuming country– the United States–helped itself to more and more millions from the producing country, Brazil. But for the benefit of whom? Of the coffee-drinking citizen? In July 1968 Brazilian coffee cost 30 percent less in the United States than in January 1964, but U.S. consumers did not pay less: they paid 13 percent more). Thus in the 1964-1968 period middlemen kept the 13 percent as well as the 30 percent, feathering their nests twice over. In the same period the price Brazilian producers received for each sack of coffee dropped by half.28 Who are the middlemen? Six U.S. concerns control more than a third of the coffee that leaves Brazil, and another six control more than a third of what enters the United States: these firms dominate the business at both ends.” just as United Fruit monopolizes the sale of bananas from Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador, as well as their importation and distribution in the United States, so U.S. firms run the coffee business and Brazil only participates as supplier and victim. The Brazilian state takes over the stocks when overproduction demands the accumulation of reserves.

But isn’t there an International Coffee Agreement to stabilize prices on the market? The World Coffee Information Center published a detailed document in Washington in 1970 to try and convince legislators that the United States should keep the agreement in force after September. The report affirms that the agreement’s chief beneficiary has been the United States, which consumes more than half the coffee sold in the world. The purchaser of the coffee beans always gets a bargain. In the U.S. market, the trivial rise in price (for the middleman’s benefit, as we have seen) has been much less than the general rise of living costs and internal wage levels; U.S. exports rose in value by one-sixth between 1960 and 1969, and in the same period the value of coffee imports dropped. And one must bear in mind that Latin American countries use depreciated foreign currency from coffee sales to buy ever costlier U,S. products.

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It is much more profitable to consume coffee than to produce it. In the United States and Europe coffee creates income and jobs and mobilizes substantial capital; in Latin America it pays hunger wages and sharpens economic deformation. It provides work for more than 600,000 people in the United States: those who distribute and sell Latin American coffee there earn infinitely more than the Brazilians, Colombians, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Haitians who plant and harvest it on the plantations. And incredible as it seems, coffee–so ECLA tells us–puts more wealth into European state coffers than it leaves in the hands of the producing countries. In effect, in 1960 and 1961 the total taxes levied on Latin American coffee by European Economic Community countries amounted to about $700 million, while supplier countries (in terms of the f.o.b. value of exports) only got $600 millions.30 The rich countries that preach free trade apply stern protectionist policies against the poor countries: they turn everything they touch–including the underdeveloped countries’ own production–into gold for themselves and rubbish for others. The international coffee marker operates so exactly like a funnel that Brazil recently agreed to impose high taxes on its soluble coffee exports, a reverse protectionism designed to protect the interests of competing U.S. manufacturers. Instant coffee made in Brazil is cheaper and better than that made by the flourishing U.S. industry; but then, of course, in a system of free competition some are freer than others.

In this kingdom of organized absurdity, natural disasters become blessings from heaven for the producing countries. They raise prices and permit the mobilization of accumulated reserves. Fierce frosts wrecked the 1969 harvest in Brazil and sealed the fate of many producers, especially the weakest, but at the same time pushed up coffee prices on the world marker and appreciably lightened the “stock” of 60 million sacks–the equivalent of two-thirds of Brazil’s external debt-which the state had accumulated to defend prices. The warehoused coffee, progressively deteriorating and losing value, could have ended up in a bonfire. It would not have been the first time. The collapse of prices and the shrinkage in consumption after the 1929 crisis caused Brazil to burn 78 million sacks; thus the efforts of 200,000 people during Five harvests went up in flames. This was a typical crisis in a colonial economy: It came from outside. Apart from burning the coffee, the fall of the planters’

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and exporters’ profits in the 1930s produced a bonfire in currency values. Such is the normal Latin American mechanism to “socialize the losses” of the export sector: losses of foreign currency are compensated in national currency through devaluation.

The consequences of rising prices are no better. While they lead to more sowing for more production, and multiply the area devoted to the fortunate crop, this acts as a boomerang since an abundance of the product demolishes prices and leads to disaster. Such was the fate of Colombia in 1958 when it harvested the coffee sown so enthusiastically four years earlier, and similar cycles have recurred throughout that country’s history. Colombia is so dependent on coffee and its external price that “in Antioquia the marriage curve responds sensitively to the coffee-price curve. Par for the course in a dependent structure: even the propitious moment for a declaration of love on an Antioquian hillside is decided on the New York Stock Exchange.”31

THE TEN YEARS THAT EMPTIED COLOMBIA’S VEINS

Back in the 1940s the noted Colombian economist Luis Eduardo Nieto Arreta wrote an apologia for coffee. Coffee had achieved what neither mines nor tobacco, nor indigo nor quinine, had managed to produce in the country’s previous economic cycles: it had given birth to a mature and progressive order. Textile factories and other light industries had arisen in coffee-producing areas- -Antioquia, Caldas, Valle del Cauca, Cundinamarca–and not by accident. A democracy made up of small farmers raising coffee had turned Colombians into “moderate and sober people. . . . The strongest premise for normality in the functioning of Colombian political life has been the attainment of our own kind of economic stability. Coffee has produced it, and with it tranquillity and moderation.”32

Violence soon erupted again. For all the panegyrics, coffee had no magic with which to end Colombia’s long history of revolt and bloody repression. This time–for ten years, from 1948 to 1957–small and large plantations, desert and farmland, valley and forest and Andean plateau were engulfed in peasant war; it put whole communities to flight, generated revolutionary guerrillas and criminal bands, and turned

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the country into a cemetery: it is estimated to have left a toll of 180,000 dead, The bloodbath coincided with a period of economic euphoria for the ruling class. But is the prosperity of a class really identifiable with the well-being of a country?

The violence began with a confrontation between Liberal and Conservative parties, but the dynamic of class hostilities steadily sharpened its class-struggle character. The Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan–known half contemptuously and half fearfully to his own party’s oligarchy as “The Wolf” or “The Idiot”– had won great popular prestige and threatened the established order. When he was shot dead, the hurricane was unleashed. First the spontaneous bogotazo– an uncontrollable human tide in the streets of the capital; then the violence spread to the countryside, where bands organized by the Conservatives had for some time been sowing terror. The bitter taste of hatred, long in the peasants’ mouths, provoked an explosion; the government sent police and soldiers to cut off testicles, slash pregnant women’s bellies, and–throw babies in the air to catch on bayonet points–the order of the day being “don’t leave even the seed.” Liberal Party sages shut themselves in their homes, never abandoning their good manners and the gentlemanly tone of their manifestos, or went into exile abroad. It was a war of incredible cruelty and it became worse as it went on, feeding the lust for vengeance. New ways of killing came into vogue: the corte corbata, for example, left the tongue hanging from the neck. Rape, arson, and plunder went on and on; people were quartered or burned alive, skinned or slowly cut in pieces; troops razed villages and plantations and rivers ran red with blood. Bandits spared lives in exchange for tribute, in money or loads of coffee, and the repressive forces expelled and pursued innumerable families, who fled to seek refuge in the mountains. Women gave birth in the woods. The first guerrilla leaders, determined to take revenge but without clear political vision, took to destroying for destruction’s sake, letting off blood and steam without purpose.

The names adopted by the protagonists of violence-Gorilla, Evil Shadow, The Condor, Redskin, The Vampire, Black Bird, Terror of the Plains-hardly suggest a revolutionary epic, yet the scent of social rebellion was in the couplets sung by their followers:

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I’m just a campesino,
I didn’t start the fight,
But if they come asking for trouble, They’ll get what’s coming to them.

There is no doubt that indiscriminate terror, mixed with the cry for justice, had emerged in the Mexican Revolution. In Colombia many just ran amok, yet that violent decade gave birth to the political guerrillas who later raised the banner of social revolution over broad areas they came to occupy and control. Hounded by the repressors, the peasants took to the mountains to organize agriculture and self-defense. The so-called independent republics continued to offer refuge to the persecuted after Conservatives and Liberals signed a peace pact in Madrid. In an ambiance of toasts and mutual goodwill, the leaders of both parties agreed to take turns in power under a banner of national unity, and then began the “clean-up” operations against foci of subversion. In one of these operations alone–the crushing of the rebels in Marquetalia–1.5 million projectiles were fired, 20,000 bombs were dropped, and 16,000 soldiers were mobilized on the ground and in the air.

At the height of the violence one official said, “Don’t bring me stories, bring me ears.” Could the sadism of the repression and the ferocity of the war be explained clinically? Were they the result of inherent evil in the protagonists? A man who cut off the hands of a priest, set fire to his body and his house, and later cut him in pieces and threw him in a sewer, cried after the war was over: “I’m not guilty. Leave me alone.” He had lost–yet in a certain sense retained– his reason: the horror of all the violence merely exposed the horror of the system. For coffee did not bring happiness and harmony as Nieto Arteta had prophesied. It is true that coffee opened up railroads, highways, and the Rio Magdalena to navigation, and that thanks to coffee enough capital was accumulated to found some industries. But the ascendancy of coffee did not affect either the oligarchical social order or the dependence of the economy on foreign power centers; on the contrary, both became far more oppressive for Colombians. Toward the end of the violent decade, the United Nations published the results of a study of nutrition in Colombia (and there has been absolutely no improvement since then): 88 percent of Bogota schoolchildren suffered from avitaminosis, 78 percent from

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riboflavinosis, and more than half were below normal weight; avitaminosis affected 71 percent of workers and 78 percent of Tensa Valley peasants.33 The study showed “a marked insufficiency of protective foods–milk and its derivatives, eggs, meat, fish, and some fruits and vegetables–which together provide protein, vitamins, and salt.” It is not only the flash of gunfire that reveals social tragedy. Statistics show that Colombia has seven times more homicides than the United States, and that one in every four Colombians of active age has no regular job. Every year 250,000 people come onto the labor market while industry fails to generate new jobs; the latifundio-minifundio system not only cannot absorb more labor, but it constantly banishes more people to swell the ranks of the unemployed in city slums. In Colombia over a million children do not attend school. This does not discourage the system from running forty-one public and private universities, each with its own faculties and departments, to educate the children of the elite and middle class.( Professor Germin Rama found that some of these venerable groves of academe contain in their libraries, like some precious patrimony, complete bound volumes of the Spanish edition of the Reader’s Digest.34)

THE WORLD MARKET CASTS ITS SPELL OVER CENTRAL AMERICA

Central American lands were comparatively unmolested up until the middle of the past century, In addition to food, the area produced cochineal and indigo with modest capital, a meager labor force, and few worries. Both the indigo plant and the cochineal bug, busily multiplying on the prickly surface of the nopal cactus, were in steady demand in European textile industries, but both of these natural pigments met a synthetic death around 1850, when German chemists invented aniline and other cheaper dyes. Thirty years after this victory of the laboratory over nature it was coffee’s turn. Central America was transformed: by 1880 its newborn plantations were raising almost one-sixth of the world’s coffee production. Coffee locked the region firmly into the world market. First English, then German, and finally U.S. buyers gave life to a native coffee bourgeoisie, which became the political power after

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the revolution led by Justo Rufino Barrios early in the 1870s. Agricultural specialization, dictated from abroad, set off a frenzy of land and labor grabbing: the Central American latifundio of today was born under the banner of free labor.

Great tracts of idle land–belonging to no one, or to the Church, or to the state–passed into private hands, and Indian communities were frenetically plundered. Peasants who declined to sell their land were hauled off into the army; plantations became human compost pits for Indians. The colonial order was revived with the forcible recruitment of labor and with laws against vagrancy, while fugitive workers were pursued with guns. Liberal governments modernized labor relations by introducing wages, but recipients of the wages became the property of upstart coffee planters. At no time in the ensuing century, of course, were periods of high prices reflected in wages, which have remained at the hunger level no matter how much was paid for the coffee. This helped prevent the development of any internal consumer market in Central America. As elsewhere, the ever expanding cultivation of coffee discouraged food-raising for the home market. These countries too were condemned to a chronic scarcity of rice, beans, corn, wheat, tobacco, and meat. A bleak subsistence agriculture barely survived on the high semi-barren lands to which the latifundio drove the Indians when it appropriated the lower and more fertile areas. The Indians who work on the plantations at harvest time spend part of the year on tiny mountain plots raising the corn and beans without which they could not survive. They are the world market’s “labor reserve.” Nothing has changed in a century: the latifundio and minifundio together make up a system based on ruthless exploitation of Indian labor. In general–but especially in Guatemala–this structure of labor force appropriation is visibly identified with racism: Indians suffer the internal colonialism of whites and mestizos blessed ideologically by the dominant culture, just as Central American countries suffer foreign colonialism.

Early in our century banana enclaves made their appearance in Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. A few railway lines financed by native capital had been built to take coffee to the ports. U.S. concerns took over these railroads and built others, to carry the products of their own plantations exclusively, while monopolizing electric light, the mails, telegraph and telephone, and–a no less important public

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Service–politics: in Honduras a mule costs more than a deputy, and throughout Central America U.S. ambassadors do more presiding than presidents. The United Fruit Company swallowed up its competitors in the production and sale of bananas and became Central America’s top latifundista, while its affiliates cornered rail and sea transport. It took over the ports and set up its own customs and police. The dollar in effect became the national currency of Central America.

THE FILIBUSTERERS COME ABOARD

In the geopolitical concept of imperialism, Central America is no more than a natural appendage of the United States. Not even Abraham Lincoln, who also contemplated annexation, could resist the “manifest destiny” of the great power to dictate to its contiguous areas.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the filibusterer William Walker, operating on behalf of bankers Morgan and Garrison, invaded Central America at the head of a band of assassins. With the obliging support of the U.S. government, Walker robbed, killed, burned, and in successive expeditions proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. He restored slavery in the areas that suffered his devastating occupation, thus continuing his country’s philanthropic work in the states that had just been seized from Mexico. He was welcomed back to the United States as a national hero. From then on invasions, interventions, bombardments, forced loans, and gun-point treaties followed one after the other. In 1912 President William H. Taft declared: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”35 Taft said that the correct path of justice in U.S. foreign policy “may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment.”36 In the same period ex- President Theodore Roosevelt loudly recalled his successful amputation of land from Colombia: “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate,” said the proud Nobel Peace Prize winner as he related how he had invented Panama. Colombia soon

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afterward received $25 million in indemnity: it was the price of a country that was born so that the United States could have a route between two oceans.

U.S. concerns took over lands, customs houses, treasuries, and governments; Marines landed here, there, and everywhere to “protect the lives and interests of U.S. citizens”–the same holy-water formula that would be used to deodorize the Dominican Republic crime in 1965. General Smedley D. Butler, who headed many of the expeditions, indicated the sort of merchandise that was wrapped inside the flag when he wrote in 1935 of his own experience:

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force–the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism…. Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. 1 helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues in…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. 1 helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903.37

In the first years of our century the philosopher William James passed the little-known judgment that the country had finally vomited the Declaration of Independence. To cite but one example: the United States occupied Haiti for twenty years and, in that black country that had been the scene of the first victorious slave revolt, introduced racial segregation and forced labor, killed 1,500 workers in one of its repressive operations (according to a U.S. Senate investigation in 1922), and when the local government refused to turn the Banco Nacional into a branch of New York’s National City Bank, suspended the salaries of the president and his ministers so that they might think again. Alternating the “big stick” with “dollar diplomacy,” similar actions were carried out in the other Caribbean islands and in all of Central America, the geopolitical space of the imperial mare nostrum.

The Koran mentions the banana among the trees of paradise, but the “bananization” of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador suggests that it is a tree of hell. United Fruit became owner of the biggest latifundio in Colombia when a big strike broke out

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on the Atlantic coast in 1928, Banana workers were mowed down with bullets in front of a railroad station. “The forces of public order are authorized to punish with the aid of appropriate weapons,” it was officially decreed, and no further decree was necessary to wipe the massacre from official memory. (This is the theme of Alvaro Cepedi Sanitidio’s novel La casa grande (1967), and also makes a chapter of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “You must have been dreaming the officers insisted.”) Miguel Angel Asturias described the process of Central American conquest and plunder in his novel The Green Pope, about Minor Keith, the uncrowned king of the region, great white father of United Fruit, devourer of nations:

“We have docks, railroads, land, buildings, and water. . . . The dollar circulates, English is spoken, and they fly our flag…. Chicago could not help but feel proud of that son who went off with a brace of pistols and returned to demand his position among the meat emperors, the railroad kings, the copper kings, the chewing-gum kings.38 (The novel is one of Asturias’s trilogy; the other two are strong Wind and Los ojos de los enterrados (The Eyes of the Buried), published in Buenos Aires in the 1950s. Mister Pyle, a character in Strong Wind, says prophetically: “If instead of making new plantations, we buy fruit from the individual growers, it’ll be much better for the future.”39 This is exactly the present situation in Guatemala: United Fruit imposes its banana monopoly through the selling end, a more effective and less risky method than direct production. It is worth noting that banana production fell sharply in the 1960s from the moment when United Fruit decided to sell and/or lease its Guatemalan plantations, then threatened by social agitation.)

In The 42nd Parallel John Dos Passos traced the dazzling career of Keith and United Fruit:

In Europe and the United States people had started to eat bananas, so they cut down the jungles through Central America to plant bananas, and built railroads to haul the bananas, and every year more steamboats of the Great White Fleet steamed north loaded with bananas, and that is the history of the American empire in the Caribbean, and the Panama canal and the future Nicaragua canal and the marines and the battleships and the bayonets.40

The land was as exhausted as the workers–the land was robbed of humus and the workers of their lungs–but there were always new lands to exploit and new workers to exterminate. Comic opera dictators watched over United Fruit’s interests with knives between their teeth. Banana production eventually fell and the omnipotent corporation

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went through various crises; although cotton and sugar have pushed the banana off its privileged perch, Central America remains to this day a bonanza- sanctuary for adventurers. Bananas are still the main source of foreign currency for Honduras and Panama and, in South America, for Ecuador. Around 1929 Central America exported 38 million bunches and United Fruit paid Honduras a penny tax on each. There was no way to see that this mini-tax–which later rose slightly–was actually paid; nor is there today, for even now United Fruit exports and imports what it likes, operating outside the state customs system. The country’s trade and payment balances are the works of fiction of exceptionally imaginative technicians.

THE CRISIS OF THE I930S: “KILLING AN ANT IS A GREATER CRIME THAN KILLING A MAN”

Coffee depended on the U.S. market, on U.S. consumption capacity, and on U.S. prices; bananas were a business of, by, and for the United States. Suddenly, in 1929, came the crisis. In the Caribbean, the New York stock market disaster which cracked the foundations of world capitalism fell like a huge block of stone into a puddle. Coffee and banana prices plummeted, along with sales. Peasants were evicted on all sides, unemployment soared, and a wave of strikes swept city and countryside; credit, investment, and public spending collapsed; and in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, state employees’ salaries were cut almost in half. Jackbooted dictators were the order of the day: in Washington it was the dawn of the Good Neighbor policy, but social agitation was boiling up everywhere and had to be sternly suppressed. For about twenty years-for some more, for some less-power would remain in the hands of Guatemala’s Jorge Ubico Castaneda, El Salvador’s Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, Honduras’s Tiburcio Carias Andino, and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza.

The epic of Augusto Cesar Sandino stirred the world. The long struggle of Nicaragua’s guerrilla leader was rooted in the angry peasants’ demand for land. His small ragged army fought for some years against 12,000 U.S. invaders and the National Guard. Sardine tins filled with stones served as grenades, Springfield rifles were stolen from the enemy,

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and there were plenty of machetes; the flag flew from any handy stick, and the peasants moved through mountain thickets wearing strips of hide called huaraches instead of boots. The guerrillas sang, to the tune of Adelita:

In Nicaragua, gentlemen,

the mouse kills the cat.
Neither the Marines’ firepower nor the bombs dropped from planes

sufficed to crush the rebels of Las Segovias; nor did the calumnies spread worldwide by Associated Press and United Press International, whose Nicaraguan correspondents were two North Americans who controlled the country’s customs houses. In 1932 Sandino had a presentiment: “I won t live very long.” A year later, under the influence of the Good Neighbor policy, hostilities ceased. The guerrilla leader was invited by the president to a decisive meeting in Managua, and on the way was killed in an ambush. The murderer, Anastasio Somoza, later said that U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane had ordered the execution. Somoza, then head of the army, soon installed himself in power. He ruled Nicaragua for a quarter of a century and then bequeathed the job to his sons. Before wrapping the presidential sash across his breast, Somoza had conferred upon himself the Cross of Valor, the Medal of Distinction, and the Presidential Medal of Merit. Once in power he organized various massacres and grand celebrations for which he dressed up his soldiers in sandals and helmets like Romans. He became the country’s biggest coffee producer, with forty-six plantations, and raised cattle on fifty-one additional haciendas. But he was never too busy to spread terror. During his long reign he lacked for nothing and even retailed with some wistfulness his youthful years when he had to forge gold coins to pay for his amusements.

The crisis brought tensions to a head, too, in El Salvador. Nearly half of Honduras’s banana workers were Salvadorans, and many had to return to their country, where there was no work for anyone, A peasant rising n the Izalco region in 1932 quickly spread throughout western El Salvador. Hernandez sent troops with modern equipment to deal with the “Bolsheviks.” The Indians fought with machetes against machine-guns and the incident ended with 10,000 dead. Hernandez, a vegetarian crank and theosophist, maintained that “killing an ant is a

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greater crime than killing a man, because a man is reincarnated after death while an ant dies once and for all.”41 He said he was protected by “invisible legions” who reported all plots and were in direct telepathic communication with the president of the United States. A pendulum clock showed him if food on a dish placed beneath it was poisoned, or showed places on a map where pirate treasure or political enemies were hidden. He used to send condolence notes to the parents of his victims, and deer pastured in the patio of his palace. He ruled until 1944.

Massacres were continual throughout the area. In Guatemala in 1933, Jorge Ubico shot one hundred trade union, student, and political leaders while restoring the laws against Indian “vagrancy.” Each Indian had to carry a book listing his days of work; if these were deemed insufficient, he paid the debt in jail or by bending his back over the ground without pay for half a year. On the unhealthy Pacific coast men worked up to their knees in mud for $.30 a day and United Fruit explained that Ubico had forced it to cut wages. Just before the dictator fell in 1944, Reader’s Digest ran a eulogistic article about him; this harbinger of the International Monetary Fund had avoided inflation by lowering wages from $1 to $.25 a day in the construction of the emergency military highway, and from $1 to $.50 for jobs on the air base in the capital. Ubico granted coffee and banana concerns permission to kill: “Plantation proprietors will be exempt from criminal responsibility. . . .” This decree– number 2,795–was revived in 1967 during the democratic and representative government of Julio César Méndez Montenegro (1966-1970).

Like all the Caribbean tyrants, Ubico thought he was Napoleon. He surrounded himself with busts and portraits of the Emperor who, he said, had the same profile. He believed in military discipline: he militarized post office employees, schoolchildren, and the symphony orchestra. Dressed in uniforms, the orchestra members played Ubico’s selections, with techniques and instruments decided by him, for $9 a month. He felt that hospitals were for sissies, and patients who were poor as well as sick were put on the floors of corridors and passageways.

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WHO STARTED THE VIOLENCE IN GUATEMALA?

Ubico was swept off his pedestal in 1944 by a revolution of liberal hue, led by some young officers and middle-class university people. Juan José Arévalo, elected to the presidency, instituted a vigorous education plan and a new labor code to protect rural and city workers. Trade unions sprang tip; United Fruit, the virtually untaxed and uncontrolled owner of vast lands and of the railroad and port, was no longer omnipotent on its domains. In his farewell speech in 1951 Arévalo disclosed that he had had to deal with thirty-two conspiracies financed by the Firm. The administration of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán continued and extended the reforms. Highways and the new port of San José broke United Fruit’s monopoly of transport and export. With national capital, and without begging from any foreign banker, various projects were launched to lead the country to independence. An agrarian reform law, aimed basically at developing a peasant capitalist economy and an agricultural capitalist economy in general, was approved in 1952. By 1954 over 100,000 families had benefited, although the law only affected idle lands and paid expropriated owners an indemnity in bonds. But since United Fruit was using a mere 8 percent of its land, which extended from ocean to ocean, its unused lands began to be distributed to the peasants. A frenetic international propaganda campaign was launched: “The Iron Curtain is failing over Guatemala,” roared the radio, newspapers, and the bigwigs of the Organization of American States. Colonel Rodolfo Castillo Armas, a graduate of the Fort Leavenworth military post, invaded his own country with troops trained and equipped for the purpose by the United States, and with support from U.S.-piloted F-47 bombers. “We had to get rid of a Communist government which had taken over,” Dwight D. Eisenhower said nine years later.42 Testifying before a Senate subcommittee on July 27, 1961, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras said that the “liberating” operation in 1954 had been worked out by a team which included himself and the ambassadors to Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. Allen Dulles, then the number one man at the CIA, had cabled them his congratulations on a job well done. Dulles had previously been on United Fruit’s board of directors, and a year after the invasion his seat was occupied by another CIA man, Walter Bedell Smith. Allen’s

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brother, John Foster Dulles, had shown burning impatience at the OAS conference that approved the military expedition against Guatemala; it so happened that the United Fruit contracts in the Ubico era had been drafted in his law office.

Arbenz’s fall started a conflagration in Guatemala which has never been extinguished. The same forces that bombed Guatemala City, Puerto Barrios, and the port of San José on the evening of June 18, 1954, are in power today. Foreign intervention was followed by a series of ferocious dictatorships– including the administration of Méndez, who lent democratic trappings to the tyranny. Arbenz’s agrarian reform was blown to smithereens when Castillo Armas fulfilled his mission of returning the land to United Fruit and other expropriates landlords; Méndez promised agrarian reform but merely signed an authorization for landlords to carry guns and to use them.

The worst year in the orgy of violence begun in 1954 was 1967. Thomas Melville, a U.S. Catholic priest expelled from Guatemala, told the National Catholic Reporter in January 1968 that in little more than a year right-wing terrorist groups had murdered more than 2,800 intellectuals, students, trade union leaders, and peasants who were trying “to combat the sicknesses of Guatemalan society.” Melville based his figure on information in the press, but most of the corpses never earned any report at all: they were poor Indians of no known name or habitat whom the army included sometimes only as numbers– in its cornmuniqués on its victories over subversion. Indiscriminate repression formed a part of the military “search and destroy” campaign against guerrilla movements. Under the newly adopted code, members of the security forces were not held responsible for homicides, and police and army communiqués were accepted as full proof by the courts. Plantation owners and managers had the legal status of local authorities, with the right to carry arms and form punitive squads. The systematic butchery set no teletypes humming; no news- hungry reporters flew to Guatemala, nor was any reproving voice heard. The world turned its back while Guatemala underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. All the men of the village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the

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center of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins. The body of Ricardo Miranda, thirty-eight holes in his head, and the head of Haroldo Silva were found beside the San Salvador highway. In Los Mixcos, Ernesto Chinchilla’s tongue was cut out. In Ojo de Agua, the Oliva Aldana brothers, blindfolded and with hands tied behind backs, were pumped full of bullets. The head of José Guzmán was chopped into a mass of tiny pieces and scattered along the road. In San Lucas Sacatepéquez, the wells yielded corpses instead of water. On the Miraflores plantation, the men greeted the dawn without hands or feet. Threats were followed by executions or by shots without warning through the back of the neck. In the cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.

The violence did not stop after that: it has been a way of life in Guatemala ever since the period of humiliation and fury begun in 1954. Corpses-although not quite so many continue to turn up in rivers and on roadsides, their featureless faces too disfigured by torture to be identified. The slaughter that is greater but more hidden–the daily genocide of poverty–also continues. In 1 968 another expelled priest, Father Blase Bonpane, reported on this sick society in the Washington Post: “Of the 70,000 people who die each year in Guatemala, 30,000 are children. The infant mortality rate in Guatemala is forty times higher than in the United States.”

THE FIRST AGRARIAN REFORM: 150 YEARS OF DEFEAT FOR JOSÉ ARTIGAS

It was the dispossessed of Latin America who, with spears and machetes, really fought against Spanish power at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Independence did not reward them; it betrayed the hopes of those who had shed their blood. Peace came, and with it a new era of daily misery. Landowners and businessmen increased their fortunes while poverty grew among the masses. The intrigues of Latin America’s new masters grew, and the four viceroyalties of the Spanish empire blew up and gave birth to many new nations, splinters of a might-have-been national unity. The “nation,” as the subcontinent’s

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gentry conceived it, looked too much like a busy port, inhabited by the mercantile and financial clientele of the British Empire, with latifundios and mines in the background. A legion of parasites, who had received the War of Independence communiqués while dancing minuets in city salons, used British-made wineglasses to drink toasts to freedom of trade. The most pompous republican slogans of the European bourgeoisie came into fashion as our countries placed themselves at the service of English industrialists and French thinkers. But what sort of “national bourgeoisie” was ours, composed of landlords, big wheelers and dealers and speculators, frock-coated politicos, and intellectuals of borrowed cultures? Latin America quickly gave birth to bourgeois constitutions well varnished with liberalism, but there was no creative bourgeoisie in the European or U.S. style to accompany them, one which would undertake as its historical mission the development of a strong national capitalism. The bourgeoisies of our countries came into being as mere instruments of international capitalism, liberally oiled cogs in the global mechanism that bled the colonies and semicolonies. These shop-window bourgeois, moneylenders, and merchants who monopolized political power had no interest in developing local manufactures, which died in the egg when free trade opened the doors to the avalanche of British merchandise. Nor were their associates, the landlords, interested in resolving “the agrarian question,” except to the extent that they could feather their own nests. The latifundio was consolidated on a foundation of plunder.

Economic, social, national frustration: a series of betrayals followed independence, and Latin America, split apart by its new frontiers, was doomed as before to monoculture and dependence. Agrarian reform was a demand from the beginning. In 1824 Sim6n Bolivar issued the Trujillo Decree, designed to protect the Indians and reorganize the land-ownership system in Peru. Its legal provisions in no way limited the Peruvian oligarchy’s privileges, which remained intact despite the Liberator’s good intentions, and the Indians were as exploited as they had been before. Earlier, Miguel Hidalgo and José Maria Morelos had been defeated in Mexico, and a century would pass before anything came of their demands for the emancipation of the dispossessed and the recovery of usurped lands.

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Down south it was José Artigas who personified the agrarian revolution. This man, the victim of impassioned vilification by official historians, led the masses during the heroic years from 1811 to 1820, in the area now occupied by Uruguay and the Argentine provinces of Santa Fe, Corrientes, Entre Rios, Misiones, and Córdoba. He wanted to lay economic, social, and political foundations for a Great Fatherland within the frontiers of the old Rio de la Plata viceroyalty, and was the most important and clear-headed of the leaders who resisted the annihilating centralism of the port of Buenos Aires. He fought against Spanish and Portuguese, and his forces were Finally crushed by a pincer movement from Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires–instruments of the British Empire–and by an oligarchy which, true to form, sold him out as soon as they saw the implications of his program of social demands.

Patriots took up arms to follow Artigas. They were mostly poor country people, rugged gauchos, Indians who rediscovered their dignity in the struggle, slaves who won freedom by joining the independence army. The cowboys’ revolution set the pampas aflame. Buenos Aires’s betrayal in leaving what is now Uruguay in the hands of Spanish power and Portuguese troops produced a mass exodus to the north. A people in arms became a people in flight: men and women, old people and children, abandoned everything to form an endless caravan of horses and carts behind their leader. Artigas called a halt on the Rio Uruguay and soon set up his government. By 1815 he controlled a large area from his Purificación camp in Paysandú. “What do you think I saw?” an English traveler reported, “His Excellency the Seńor Protector of half the New World sitting on the head of an ox beside a bonfire on the muddy soil of his ranch, eating barbecued meat and drinking gin from a cow s horn! A dozen ragged officers surrounded him….”43 Soldiers, aides-de-camp, and scouts rode in at the gallop from all directions. Pacing, hands behind his back, Artigas dictated the revolutionary decrees of his people’s government. Two secretaries- -carbon paper didn’t exist–took notes. Thus was born Latin America’s first agrarian reform; it was applied for a year in the “Eastern Province” (today’s Uruguay) and then–after the oligarchy opened the doors of Montevideo to General Lecor, greeted him as a liberator, and conducted him beneath a canopy to a solemn honor-the-invader Te Deum in the Cathedral smashed by a new Portuguese invasion. Artigas had earlier levied a tariff

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which heavily taxed foreign merchandise that competed with domestic products–manufactures and crafts which were substantially developed lay within the leader’s dominions, At the same time, he stopped the taxation on the importation of means of production which were needed for economic development, and fixed a trifling duty on such Latin American products as Paraguayan yerba mate and tobacco. The gravediggers of the revolution were also to bury these tariff measures.

The agrarian code of 1815–free land, free men–was the most advanced and glorious of the many constitutions the Uruguayans would have. Artigas’s code was no doubt influenced by the ideas of Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos in the reformist era of Charles III, but beyond question it was also a revolutionary response to the national need for economic recovery and social justice. It included expropriation and distribution of the lands of “bad Europeans and worse Americans,” who emigrated because of the revolution and were never pardoned. Lands belonging to the revolution’s enemies were expropriated without indemnity–and let it be recalled that these enemies owned the great majority of the latifundios. Children did not have to pay for the sins of their fathers: the code offered them the same as it offered poor patriots. Lands were distributed on the principle that “the most unfortunate will be the most privileged.” Indians, in Artigas’s view, had “the chief right.” The essence of this agrarian reform was to settle the rural poor on the land, making a peasant out of the gaucho who was accustomed to a roving life in war and to clandestine activities and smuggling in peace, Subsequent La Plata basin governments would mercilessly suppress the gaucho, forcing him to work as a peon on big estates, but Artigas wanted to make him an owner of land: the rebel gauchos began to enjoy honest work, built ranches and corrals, and planted their first crops.

Foreign intervention wiped it all out. The oligarchy reared its head and took vengeance. The validity of Artigas’ land distribution was legislatively repudiated. From 1820 until the end of the century, the poor patriots who had benefited from the agrarian reform were violently evicted. The only land they kept was enough to be buried in. The defeated Artigas had gone to Paraguay, to die alone after a long exile of austerity and silence. The land titles he had issued were without value: government attorney Bernardo Bustamante, for example, said that “the

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worthlessness of the said documents” was clear at first sight. Meanwhile, “order” restored, his government hastened to celebrate the first constitution of an independent Uruguay, that fragment of the Great Fatherland Artigas had vainly fought to consolidate.

The code of 1815 contained special clauses to avoid the accumulation of land in a few hands. In our day the Uruguayan countryside looks like a desert: 500 families monopolize half of all the land and, to crown their power, also control three-quarters of the capital invested in industry and banking. Agrarian reform protects pile up in the parliamentary cemetery while the countryside is depopulated: unemployment proliferates and the number of people occupied in agriculture steadily dwindles from one dramatic census to another. The country makes its living from wool and meat, but its pastures contain fewer sheep and fewer cows than at the beginning of our century. The backwardness of production methods is reflected in the low yields from livestock–dependent for food on periodic rains and natural soil fertility–and from crop farming. Meat production per animal is not even half that of France or Germany, and the same applies to milk in comparison with New Zealand, Denmark, and Holland. Every sheep produces a kilogram less wool than in Australia. Per hectare wheat yields are three times lower than in France, corn seven times lower than in the United States. The big landowners send their profits abroad, spend their summers at Punta del Este, and do not reside at their latifundios even in winter, paying occasional visits in their own airplanes. When the Asoclación Rural was founded a century ago, two-thirds of its members already made their homes in the capital. The extensive production, left to nature and hungry peons, causes them no headaches.

And it certainly pays off. The rents and profits of cattle capitalists now amount to no less than $75 million a year.( In the period of the rise of national industry, strongly subsidized and protected by the state, a large part of agricultural profits went into new factories. When industry entered its cycle of crisis, surplus capital from cattle-raising was diverted in ocher directions; Punta del Este’s most useless and luxurious mansions were built on the nation’s misfortune. Speculators then began feverishly fishing in the turbid waters of inflation. Above all, there was a flight of the capital and profits that the country produces year by year. According to official figures, between 1962 and 1966, $250 million fled Uruguay for safe Swiss and U.S. banks. There was also, two decades ago, the flight of young people from countryside to city, seeking jobs in developing industry. Today it continues by land or by sea to foreign countries, although their fate is of course not the same. The capital is received with open arms,

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but the uprooted pilgrims have to face a cold and uncertain destiny. The Uruguay of 1971, shaken by profound crisis, is no longer the oasis of peace and progress that attracted European immigrants; it is a turbulent land condemning its own inhabitants to emigration. It produces violence and exports people as naturally as it produces and exports meat and wool.) Despite low yields, profits stay up because of extremely low costs. A landscape without people: the biggest latifundios provide work for barely two people per 1,000 hectares, and then not for the whole year. The always available labor supply accumulates miserably in hut settlements beside the ranches. The gaucho of folklore, the subject of paintings and poems, is a far cry from the peon who works the broad, hostile lands today. Instead of leather boots, he wears frayed sandals; instead of a wide belt adorned with gold or silver, an ordinary belt, or merely a knotted cord. The producers of meat have lost the right to eat it: rarely do these Creoles have access to the typical Creole roast, juicy tender meat turning golden over a fire. Misleadingly rosy international statistics notwithstanding, the truth is that pasta-and-chicken innards stew–no source of protein–is the basic diet of the Uruguayan campesino.

ARTEMIO CRUZ AND THE SECOND DEATH OF EMILIANO ZAPATA

Just a century after the Artigas land code, Emiliano Zapata introduced far- reaching agrarian reform in his zone of revolutionary jurisdiction in southern Mexico. It was five years after the dictator Porfirio Diaz had celebrated with huge fiestas the centenary of the Grito de Dolores, the beginning of the Mexican war of independence from Spain. The official Mexico of frock-coated gentlemen olympically ignored the real Mexico whose poverty fed their splendor. In this republic of outcasts, workers’ wages had not risen by a centavo since the historic rising of the priest Miguel Hidalgo in 1810. In 1910, 800-odd latifundistas, many of them foreigners, owned almost all the national territory. They were urban princelings who lived in the capital or in Europe and very occasionally visited their estates–where they slept shielded by high, buttressed walls of dark stone. On the other side of the walls, the peons huddled in adobe hovels. Of a population of 15 million, 12 million depended on rural wages, almost all of which were paid at the hacienda

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company stores in astronomically priced beans, flour, and liquor. Prison, barracks, and vestry shared the task of combating the natural defects of the Indians who, as a member of one illustrious family put it, were born “weak, drunk, and thieving.” With the worker tied by inherited debts or by legal contract, slavery was the actual labor system on Yucatάn henequen plantations, on the tobacco plantations of the Valle Nacional, on Chiapas and Tabasco timberland and fruit orchards, and on the rubber, coffee, sugarcane, tobacco, and fruit plantations of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Morelos. In a fine report on his visit, John Kenneth Turner wrote that “the United States has virtually reduced Diaz to a political dependency, and by so doing has virtually transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the United States.”44 U.S. capital made juicy profits directly or indirectly from its association with the dictatorship. “The Americanization of Mexico of which Wall Street boasts,” wrote Turner, “is being accomplished and accomplished with a vengeance.”45

In 1845 the United States had annexed the Mexican territories of Texas and California, where it restored slavery in the name of civilization. Mexico also lost the present states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah- more than half the country. The stolen territory was equal in size to present-day Argentina. “Poor Mexico!” it has been said ever since, “so far from God and so close to the United States!” After the invasion, the rest of Mexico’s mutilated territory suffered from U.S. investments ‘in copper, petroleum, rubber, sugar, banking, and transportation. Far from guiltless in the extermination of the Maya and Yaqui Indians on Yucatάn henequen plantations— on concentration camps where men, women, and children were bought and sold like mules–was the Standard Oil affiliate American Cordage Trust, which bought more than half the henequen and could sell it cheap at a handsome profit. But sometimes, as Turner discovered, the exploitation of slave labor was direct. A North American administrador bought press-ganged peons in lots at fifty pesos a head. He told Turner: “We always kept them as long as they lasted…. In less than three months we buried more than half of them.”46 (Mexico was the preferred country for U.S. investments: at the end of the century it had almost a third of the U.S. capital invested abroad. In Chihuahua state and in other northern areas, William Randolph Hearst, the “Citizen Kane” of Orson Welles’s Film, owned more than 3 million hectares.)

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Mexico’s hour of revenge struck in 1910: the country rose in arms against Porfirio Diaz. An agricultural leader headed the insurrection in the south: he was Emiliano Zapata, purest of revolutionaries, most loyal to the cause of the poor, most determined to right the wrongs of society.

For agricultural communities throughout Mexico, the last decades of the nineteenth century had been a period of ruthless pillage. In Morelos, towns and villages were the victims of a bout of land-, water-, and labor-grabbing as sugarcane plantations expanded voraciously. Sugar haciendas dominated the life of the state, and their prosperity had brought with it modern mills, big distilleries, and railroad spurs. In Anenecuilco, where Zapata lived and to which he belonged body and soul, the plundered peasants claimed the soil they had worked for seven continuous centuries: they were there before Cort6s arrived. But those who spoke up were marched off to forced labor in Yucatάn. Throughout their state, whose good land belonged to seventeen families, they lived considerably worse than the polo ponies the latifundistas pampered in luxurious stables. A law in 1909, providing further seizure of land from its legitimate owners, was the last straw. Zapata, taciturn but famous as the state’s best horsebreaker and respected by all for his honesty and courage, turned guerrillero. The men of the south quickly formed a liberating army.

Diaz fell and the revolution swept Francisco Indalecio Madero into power. Promises of agrarian reform soon disappeared in a fog of “institutionalism.” On his wedding day, Zapata had to interrupt the party: the government had sent General Victoriano Huerta’s troops to crush him. According to the learned pundits in the city, the hero had become a “bandit.” In November 1911 Zapata proclaimed the Plan de Ayala and wrote: “I am resolved to struggle against everything and everybody.”47 The Plan noted that “the overwhelming majority of Mexican communities and citizens are owners of no more than the land they walk on,” and proposed that the property of enemies of the revolution be nationalized, that lands usurped by the latifundista avalanche be returned to their legal owners, and that a third of the remaining hacendados’ lands be expropriated. The Plan de Ayala became a magnet, drawing thousands upon thousands of peasants into Zapata’s ranks. Zapata denounced “the infamous pretension” of reducing

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everything to a mere change of men in government: the revolution was not being made for that.

The struggle went on for nearly ten years-against Diaz, against Madero, against Huerta the assassin, and later against Venustiano Carranza. The long war years were also years of continual U.S. intervention: the Marines staged two landings and several bombardments, diplomatic agents framed a variety of political plots, and Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson successfully organized the murder of President Madero and his vice president. The successive shifts of power did not dilute the fury of the attacks against Zapata and his forces, for they were the real danger, the open expression of the class struggle deeply imbedded in the national revolution. Governments and newspapers clamored against “the vandal hordes” of the general, from Morelos. Powerful armies were sent, one after the other, against him. Fire, massacre, and the devastation of villages proved equally futile. Men, women, and children were shot or hanged as “Zapatista spies,” with proclamations of victory following the butcheries: the clean-up has succeeded! But in the nomadic revolutionaries’ mountain camps in the south, bonfires soon blazed up again. More than once Zapata’s forces counterattacked successfully up to the suburbs of the capital. After the fall of Huerta’s regime, Zapata and Pancho Villa–the “Attila of the South” and the “Centaur of the North”–entered Mexico City as conquerors and arranged a temporary division of power. At the end of 1914, a brief period of peace enabled Zapata to put into force, in Morelos, an agrarian reform even more radical than that outlined in the Plan de Ayala. The founder of the Socialist Parry and some anarchosyndicalist militants considerably influenced this process; they radicalized the leader’s ideology without weakening his traditionalist roots, and afforded him indispensable organizational know-how.

The agrarian reform proposed to “destroy at the roots and forever the unjust monopoly of land, in order to realize a social state which guarantees fully the natural right which every man has to an extension of land necessary for his own subsistence and that of his family.”41 Lands taken from communities and individuals since the deamortization law of 1856 were restored; maximum limits were laid down for holding sizes, according to climate and fertility; and the lands of enemies of the revolution were declared national property. This last political decision

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had, as in the Artigas agrarian reform, a clear economic meaning: the latifundistas were the enemy. Technical schools, tool factories, and a rural credit bank were established; sugarmills and distilleries were nationalized and became public services. A system of local democracy put the reins of political power and of economic maintenance in the people’s hands. Zapatista schools sprouted and spread, popular juntas were organized for defense and the promotion of revolutionary principles, and an authentic democracy took shape and gained in strength. The municipalities were nuclear units of government and the people elected their leaders, courts, and police. Military leaders had to submit to the wishes of organized civilian communities. Bureaucrats and generals no longer imposed methods of production and of living. The revolution tied itself to tradition and functioned “in conformity with the customs and usage of each pueblo . . . that is, if a certain pueblo wants the communal system, so it will be executed, and if another pueblo wants the division of land in order to admit small property, so it will be done.”

In the spring of 1915 all the fields of Morelos were under cultivation, mostly with corn and food crops. Meanwhile food was short and hunger loomed in Mexico City. Carranza, who had won the presidency, also ordered a land reform, but his henchmen speedily cornered all its benefits. In 1916 Morelos’s capital, Cuernavaca, and the Zapatista district were threatened by powerful forces. Crops now coming to fruition, minerals, hides, and machines were attractive booty for the advancing officers, who set fires as they came, and proclaimed “a work of reconstruction and progress.”

A stratagem and a betrayal ended Zapata’s life in 1919. A thousand men lying in ambush fired into his body. He died at the same age as Che Guevara. The legend of a sorrel horse, galloping alone southward through the mountains, survived him. But not only the legend: the resolve of all Morelos to “complete the reformer’s work, avenge the martyr’s blood, and follow the hero’s example” found an echo throughout the country. Time passed and under the presidency of Lάzaro Cάrdenas (1934-1940), the Zapatista tradition regained life and vigor with the nationwide implementation of agrarian reform. Mainly during this administration, 67 million hectares owned by foreign or Mexican corporations were expropriated, and in addition to the land peasants received credits, education, and the means to organize their work. The

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economy and population had begun their accelerating rise; agricultural production multiplied while the whole country underwent modernization and industrialization. Cities expanded and the consumer market grew in breadth and depth.

But Mexican nationalism did not lead to socialism and consequently, like other countries that failed to take the decisive step, Mexico did not fully achieve its goals of economic independence and social justice. The million dead in the revolutionary war years had paid blood tribute “to a Huitzilopoxtli more cruel and insatiable than the one our ancestors worshiped: the capitalist development of Mexico under conditions imposed by subordination to imperialism.”49 The fading of the bright banners has been studied by a variety of scholars. Edmundo Flores writes in an official publication that “at the present time, 60 percent of Mexico’s total population has incomes below $120 a year and goes hungry.”50 Eight million Mexicans consume almost nothing but beans, corn, tortillas, and chilis. The Tlatelolco massacre of some 500 students in 1 968 is not the only evidence of the system’s deep contradictions. Using official figures, Alonso Aguilar concludes that Mexico has some 2 million landless peasants, 3 million children not attending school, around 11 million illiterates, and 5 million who have no shoes. Collectively owned ejido land is continually being partitioned, and along with the multiplication of minifundios- -which themselves become steadily more fragmented–a new type of latifundio system, and a new agrarian bourgeoisie engaged in large-scale commercial farming, have made their appearance. Local landlords and entrepreneurs, who have achieved a dominant position by trampling on the letter and spirit of the law, are in turn dominated: a recent book classifies them within the words “and Co.” attached to Anderson, Clayton.51 In the same book, Lάzaro Cάrdenas’s son writes that “the camouflaged latifundios have been established, when possible, on the best and most productive lands.”

Novelist Carlos Fuentes has reconstructed, in reverse chronological order, the life of a captain in Carranza’s army who, in war and then in peace, uses gun and cunning to make his way to the top.52 A man of humble origin, Artemio Cruz sheds the idealism and heroism of his youth as the years pass: he helps himself to land, founds and multiplies businesses, gets a seat in the Congress, and climbs the shining steps to the peaks of society, accumulating wealth, power, and prestige by

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wheeling and dealing, bribery, speculation, audacity, and the bloody repression of the Indians. His pilgrim’s progress resembles that of the potently impotent party of the Mexican revolution which virtually monopolizes the country’s political life in our time. Both have fallen upward.

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