Dependency and Influence

Abstract

In 1830, Henry Strouder described the existence of an important difference between Cuba and the British West Indies in that “the mother country is by no means a creditor of this country.” Cuban landowners were resident in the island, with their sources of funding coming from towns such as Havana or Matanzas, which had the same importance as London or Liverpool did for the British West Indies. “The proximity of the creditor” gave Cuban planters “a decided advantage as to judicious discriminations.”¹ Nevertheless, the origins of Cuban economic indebtedness and dependency—not exclusively to U.S. capital, but to a range of transnational investors can be traced not only back into the first half of the nineteenth century, and the costs of technological development of the Cuban sugar industry and related infrastructure, but even into the eighteenth century, by when the increasingly powerful merchant class was gaining control of many plantations.² In 1830, no more than four or five merchant houses in Havana had access to blank credits in Europe, and those that had them were non-Spanish, since the Spanish merchants considered such a system “as derogatory to their standing.”³ Initially there were also no banks operating directly in the island and no system of government securities. It was partly as a result of this that the Cuban economy quickly became so dependent upon the foreign-led commercial networks and in debt to foreign bankers.⁴