Open Veins of Latin America Page 9
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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.
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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 subproduct 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
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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.
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At the end of the sixteenth century Brazil had no less than 120 sugarmills worth some PS2 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--
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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 1870 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 64
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 1666 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.
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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 1786 the colony brought in 27,000 slaves; in the following year, 40,000. Revolution broke out in the fall of 1791 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
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expeditions against them. The country was born in ruins and never recovered: today it is the poorest in Latin Am
erica.
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.