1830 Census

Sugar cane has been known by humans for several millennia before Jesus Christ because of its gentleness as descriptions of travelers to India, the inhabitants of the valley of the Indo chewed cane to get the juice it some 500 years BC In Spain, the sugar cane enters during the Moorish period, and Columbus included cane between animals and plants, it has during his third trip to the New World (August 30, 1498). Planted in the sweet land of Santo Domingo and because of the weather of the tropics, sugarcane has increased so fine as to produce the best of its sweetness. Already in 1506, Brother Bartholomew Las Casas refers to the sugar factory rustic first on the island.

Like almost everything brought to Cuba during this period, the conqueror Diego Velazquez is to introduce sugar cane in Santo Domingo, and from that time the settlers began to produce guarapo (the juice from the cane sugar) needed to get the sugar. The remainder of the preparation of homemade sugar was the main base for trade with other settlers, and sugar, salt meat and corn became the basis of trade with the pirates to obtain slaves.

The first commercial sugar mill was installed during the last decades of the 16th century in the region of La Habana and already in 1600, 60 sugar factories have been operating. During this period, Cuba was behind La Hispaniola and other colonies in the production of sugar. It was during the British attack in 1762 that Cuba open trade and increased production of sugar was observed. The first production was counted in 1799 and has reached six with six thousand tons of sugar factories one hundred existing at the time.

Sugar refineries does not appear until the first decades of the 19th century with the introduction of the steam engine. According to a census of this period, in 1830, there were refineries over a thousand sugar producers by approximately 94,000 tons and in 1837 when steam locomotives arrived in Cuba, the sugar production increased numbers unprecedented. Cuba was the seventh country in the world to rail, and the first in Latin America thanks to the sugar industry on the rise.

The independence of Cuba on May 20, 1902 supported the introduction of new machinery and the presence of American capital. With less than 200 sugar mills large in 1925, the fledgling nation of Cuba has produced more than five million tonnes of sugar. During this period, the vast majority of sugar mills and sugar plantations were in the hands of foreign capital, but some social laws implemented between 1935 and 1945 led in 1950 to 161 sugar mills great work, 131 were in the hands of Cubans, controls 60% of total production.

With the triumph of the Revolution, the sugar mills were nationalized and became socialist societies, and most of the plantations that were in the hands of small producers and foreground. Although production has been maintained millionaire, industry and agriculture based on cane sugar declined over the past 50 years. Today, the sugar is not an important product in the scale of trade in Cuba. Nearly 70 large sugar mills have been dismantled, and much of the sugar cane crop is now used to produce syrup and refined sugar cane liquor for chemical, pharmaceutical and production of alcohol (rum Havana Club being among them). The last known results of a cane harvest dates from 2006-2007 with a production of 1,115,000 tons of sugar, not unlike the crop of 1894.