are exported which are produced in other parts of the island.  The cultivation of tobacco has been one of the most uncertain branches of industry in Cuba.  Trammeled by restrictions and exactions, it was confined almost entirely to the poorer classes of the population, who were enabled to raise a scanty and uncertain crop through the advances of capital made them by the “Factoria.”  Since the suppression of this monopoly, it has had to contend with the more popular and profitable pursuit of sugar planting, which has successfully competed with it for the employment of the capital, skill and labor of the island.

Sugar cane and its cultivation.

Maturin Ballou, in his “Cuba Past and Present,” published in 1885, when the sugar industry was in its best days, writes an interesting account of cane cultivation: 

“Sugar cane is cultivated like Indian corn, which it also resembles in appearance.  It is first planted in rows, not in hills, and must be hoed and weeded until it gets high enough to shade its roots.  Then it may be left to itself until it reaches maturity.  This refers to the first laying out of a plantation, which will afterwards continue fruitful for years, by very simple processes of renewal.  When thoroughly ripe the cane is of a light golden yellow, streaked here and there with red.  The top is dark green, with long, narrow leaves depending, very much like those of the corn stalk, from the center of which shoots upward a silvery stem, a couple of feet in height, and from its tip grows a white fringed plume of a delicate lilac hue.  The effect of a large field at its maturity, lying under a torrid sun, and gently yielding to the breeze, is very fine, a picture to live in the memory ever after.

“In the competition between the products of beet-root sugar and that from sugar cane, the former controls the market, because it can be produced at a cheaper rate, besides which its production is stimulated by nearly all of the European states, through the means of liberal subsidies both to the farmer and to the manufacturer.  Beet sugar, however, does not possess so high a percentage of true saccharine matter as the product of the cane, the latter seeming to be nature’s most direct mode of supplying us with the article.  The Cuban planters have one advantage over all other sugar-cane producing countries, in the great and inexhaustible fertility of the soil of the island.  For instance, one or two hogsheads of sugar to the acre is considered a good yield in Jamaica, but in Cuba three hogsheads are the average.  Fertilizing of any sort is rarely employed in the cane fields, while in beet farming it is the principal agent of success.  Though the modern machinery, as lately adopted on the plantations, is very expensive, still the result achieved by it is so much superior to that of the old methods of manufacture, that the small planters are being driven from the market.  Slave labor cannot compete with machinery.  The low price of sugar renders economy imperative in all branches of the business, in order to leave a margin for profit.