Cuba

19 Pages 4682 Words

because the effects of the European invasion eliminated the indigenous population in the sixteenth century.

Demographically, Cuba is a racially-mixed, Spanish-speaking society with an estimated 1996 population of eleven million. The racial makeup is approximately 40 percent black, 30 percent white and 30 percent mixed. The importation of 600,000 Africans into Cuba between 1800 and 1865 and heavy importation of black labor from Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century explains Cuba's large percentage of black and mixed-race persons. [Skidmore, pp. 254-55]

Politically, Cuba was less important to Spain during the early years because it lacked the mineral wealth that drove Spanish imperialism. It was important as a staging area for the exploration and then conquest, and, subsequently, as a guardian of the entrance to the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

Economically, Cuba developed primarily as a single-crop, export-import, agricultural society based on African-slave labor. Cubans began sugar production in the early nineteenth century and by the 1860's were producing one-third of the world's sugar supply. U.S. investors plunged into this sugar-based economy and quickly concentrated land and mills in American ownership. The sugar boom and American investment created an economy almost wholly dependent upon sugar exports and closely tied the welfare of the island to the erratic, world sugar market.

This volatile economic market had both immediate and long-term effects on Cuba. First, the sugar trade played a significant role in starting the 1895 Cuban Revolution and the Spanish-American War that followed in 1898. Second, the economics of the sugar trade eliminated small farms and, by doing so, eliminated or prevented development of a peasant class, a fact that would become important to Castro's Revolution.

In 1891 the U.S. Congress removed the tariff on most imported sugar and negotiated trade agreements...