To Cuba and Back

with berries of changing hues, and, twice a year, brought its fruit to maturity. That the coffee might be tended and gathered, avenues wide enough for wagons must be carried through the plantations, at frequent intervals. The plantation was, therefore, laid out like a garden, with avenues and foot paths, all under the shade of the finest trees, and the spaces between the avenues were groves of fruit trees and shade trees, under which grew, trimmed down to the height of five or six feet, the coffee plant. The labor of the plantation was in tending, picking, drying, and shelling the coffee, and gathering the fresh fruits of trees for use and for the market, and for preserves and sweetmeats, and in raising vegetables and poultry, and rearing sheep and horned cattle and horses. It was a beautiful and simple horticulture, on a very large scale. Time was required to perfect this garden⁠—the Cubans call it paradise⁠—of a cafetal; but when matured, it was a cherished home. It required and admitted of no extraordinary mechanical power, or of the application of steam, or of science, beyond the knowledge of soils, of simple culture, and of plants and trees.

For twenty years and more it has been forced upon the knowledge of the reluctant Cubans, that Brazil, the West India Islands to the southward of Cuba, and the Spanish Main, can excel them in coffee raising. The successive disastrous hurricanes of 1843 and 1845, which destroyed many and damaged most of the coffee estates, added to the colonial system of the mother country, which did not give extraordinary protection to this product, are commonly said to have put an end to the coffee plantations. Probably, they only hastened a change which must at some time have come. But the same causes of soil and climate which made Cuba inferior in coffee growing, gave her a marked superiority in the cultivation of sugar. The damaged plantations were not restored as coffee estates, but were laid down to the sugarcane; and gradually, first in the western and northern parts, and daily extending easterly and southerly over the entire island, the exquisite cafetals have been prostrated and dismantled, the groves of shade and fruit trees cut down, the avenues and footpaths ploughed up, and the denuded land laid down to wastes of sugarcane.

The sugarcane allows of no shade. Therefore the groves and avenues must fall. To make its culture profitable, it must be raised in the largest possible quantities that the extent of land will permit. To attempt the raising of fruit, or of the ornamental woods, is bad economy for the sugar planter. Most of the fruits, especially the orange, which is the chief export, ripen in the midst of the sugar season, and no hands can be spared to attend to them. The sugar planter often buys the fruits he needs for daily use and for making preserves, from the neighboring cafetals. The cane ripens but once a year. Between the time when enough of it is ripe to justify beginning to work the mill, and the time when the heat and rains spoil its qualities, all the sugar making of the year must be done. In Louisiana, this period does not exceed eight weeks. In Cuba it is full four months. This gives Cuba a great advantage. Yet these four months are short enough; and during that time, the steam engine plies and the furnace fires burn night and day.

Sugar making brings with it steam, fire, smoke, and a drive of labor, and admits of and requires the application of science. Managed with skill and energy, it is extremely productive. Indifferently managed, it may be a loss. The sugar estate is not valuable, like the coffee estate, for what the land will produce, aided by ordinary and quiet manual labor only. Its value is in the skill, and the character of the labor. The land is there, and the Negroes are there; but the result is loss or gain, according to the amount of labor that can be obtained, and the skill with which the manual labor and the mechanical powers are applied. It is said that at the present time, in the present state of the market, a well-managed sugar estate yields from fifteen to twenty-five percent on the investment. This is true, I am inclined to think, if by the investment be meant only the land, the machinery, and the slaves. But the land is not a large element in the investment. The machinery is costly, yet its value depends on the science applied to its construction and operation. The chief item in the investment is the slave labor. Taking all the slaves together, men, women, and children, the young and the old, the sick and the well, the good and the bad, their market value averages above $1,000 a head. Yet of these, allowing for those too young or too old, for the sick, and for those who must tend the young, the old and the sick, and for those whose labor, like that of the cooks, only sustains the others, not more than one half are able-bodied, productive laborers. The value of this chief item in the investment depends largely on moral and intellectual considerations. How unsatisfactory is it, then, to calculate the profits of the investment, when you leave out of the calculation the value of the controlling power, the power that extorts the contributions of labor from the steam and the engine and the fire, and from the more difficult human will. This is the “plus x” of the formula, which, unascertained, gives us little light as to the result.

But, to return to the changes wrought by this substitution of sugar for coffee. The sugar plantation is no grove, or garden, or orchard. It is not the home of the pride and affections of the planter’s family. It is not a coveted, indeed, hardly a desirable residence. Such families as would like to remain on