Steam and Sugarocracy

Abstract

In 1850, the Faro Industrial of Havana advertised the services of a “friendly tortilla seller who lives in Monserrate Street,” who boasted of “offering the public… an exquisite selection made to marvellous perfection,” with sugar from, and in honor of, “Derosne’s outstanding machine.”¹ The referred-to machine was the vacuum evaporator, designed by the French engineer Derosne, that had recently been applied to sugar production in some of the largest Cuban mills, and was enabling the elaboration, without recourse to further refining, of an even higher quality white sugar than that for which Cuba had already become renowned. This was a prime example of the technological developments of the nineteenth century, applied to sugar production, which led to the migration of maquinistas to Cuba. It was also such increasingly expensive innovations that would gradually lead the island’s economy to fall under the control of foreign investors. However, the initial impulse for the introduction of the most advanced pieces of machinery available at the time, which were to make Cuba the most industrially sophisticated of mid-nineteenth-century sugar colonies, came from the island itself, with Cuban sugar planters initiating Cuba’s entry into the transnational networks not only of trade but also of technological transfer.