Sugar in the Blood (49 page)

As the exclusive glittering coastline has become more economically important than the farm-friendly interior, the relationship of the citizens to the island they live on has shifted and the pattern of land ownership has changed. When my parents were young, the parish of St. James was not especially popular with locals; it was overgrown and swampy, with only a few homes perched on the edge of the sea. Indeed, driving along that coast at night was positively spooky, with the large trees creating a dark canopy across the road, which buzzed with a cloud of mosquitoes. Now St. James is dubbed “the platinum coast,” and the cost of property has been so inflated by the wealthy visitors who have built their holiday homes there that locals can only dream of living within its boundaries. In some places too their island has been reduced to a theme park in which the real has been superseded by the fake. Six Men’s Village, one of the last places on the island where fishing boats are made, is destined to become a marina; and Port St. Charles, a new tourist development, sits on a beach created with sand imported from Miami.

If today Barbados is the playground of the rich and famous, the legacy of sugar, slavery and settlement is becoming less visible with time. The fields of sugar cane are still a common sight across the island but the landscape is littered with the skeletons of the windmills that once powered the sugar factories. And virtually no slave dwellings remain standing. These fragile structures, cheaply built of wattle and daub, have long since succumbed to storms and the passage of time. The plantation great houses, designed to last, have of course fared much better. A few of these are still occupied by well-to-do families, while others have been converted into “boutique” hotels. Still others have been co-opted by the “heritage industry,” converted into tourist attractions where visitors are taken on tours through their gracious rooms and beautiful grounds. Here, as in the American South, the old days have been commercially buffed and burnished, so that every trace of the blood and brutality of slavery has disappeared. Plantation life is sanitized into an era of gracious comfort, with the assumption that the visitor would identify with the slave owner and not the slave.

My family’s story has counterparts outside Barbados and the British Caribbean. Across the globe, sugar has forged tens of millions of other families, and in many of the places in which it has been cultivated the crop has shaped that nation’s ethnic landscape and determined its social structure. To the northeast of my family’s island home, for example, on the Spanish-speaking island of Cuba, the tale is essentially the same, even if some permutations of that island’s history are different. As in Barbados, sugar’s presence on the island was almost as old as colonization itself. Columbus was said to have brought the crop there on his second voyage to the New World but instead of indentured servants, the crop was originally farmed by the island’s indigenous Amerindians: the Tainos. Rather than a sugar “revolution,” however, Cuba’s engagement with the crop was gradual, large-scale production beginning only after the collapse of the sugar cane industry in nearby Haiti in the early nineteenth century.

As in my homeland, the commodity quickly became “the cornerstone of Cuban society,” according to the historian Ramiro Sanchez. By then, black slaves and their descendants had become the laborers of choice and a new class of wealthy planters emerged perched atop a profoundly hierarchical society. By the mid-nineteenth century Cuba produced one-third of the world’s sugar and American investors began to pay attention. Soon its cultivation was in their control. The island’s sugar interests, known as “Big Sugar,” were so pivotal to Cuba’s political and economic fortunes that when Castro came to power in 1959, he threatened to diversify agriculture on the island so it would be less reliant on the commodity. But these initiatives failed and sugar remains the most important crop cultivated in Cuba.

Sugar’s story also has a significant place in Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty”: the United States. While my family’s story was unfolding, a parallel saga was being spun in the region called Louisiana. A Jesuit priest is said to have brought sugar cane there in 1751. But unable to adapt the existing technology to that territory’s climate, it was, for several decades, cultivated only halfheartedly, its meager output largely converted into molasses. But things changed after 1803, when Napoleon, embarrassed by his defeat in Haiti, decided to wash his hands of
his American colonies, and sold Louisiana to the United States for a measly $15 million. It was such a bargain, that it was no wonder that General Horatio Gates declared to an exultant Thomas Jefferson, “Let the Land rejoice, for you have bought Louisiana for a Song.”

By the early part of the nineteenth century, with the aid of more sophisticated technology, Louisiana was a full-fledged slave-holding, sugar-producing state. Its unique plantocracy—a mixture of French refugees from Haiti, cotton growers from the American south, and locals—treated its laborers even more terribly than those of the Caribbean. As one slave testified: Louisiana was “de mos’ wicked country … God’s son ever died for.” They justified their abuse of their enslaved population with the same twisted racial theories so ably mobilized by the planters in Barbados. But despite these beliefs, liaisons between planters and their slaves were so ubiquitous in the region that they were almost institutionalized. As in Barbados, a Creole community emerged where the lighter the shade of skin, the greater the social privileges. It is no wonder that post-emancipation Louisiana remained racially stratified and oppressive, or that other coercive strategies were subsequently devised to maintain its abused labour force, which had less political clout than workers in the Caribbean because they were a racial minority. Whatever the ongoing travails of those who cultivate it, today sugar in contemporary Louisiana is the basis of a $2 billion economy.

But it was in Brazil that the marriage between sugar and slavery would reach its apotheosis. Not only was this vast South American territory the first mass exploiter of black slaves, it ultimately imported more captives than any other country, and it would be the last nation in the Americas to free its enslaved population. Part of a virtually unknown continent, Brazil was claimed by the Portuguese at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But the colonizing effort there got off to a rather sluggish start. Dreaming of mountains of gold, rubies and pearls ready for the plucking, the Portuguese found instead a superfluity of monkeys, parrots and forests of brazilwood. As a result it was left largely to its own devices for a few decades and proper colonial settlements were only founded in the 1530s and 1540s.

But if commercial development was slow, the exploitation of forced labour was not. The first victims were the indigenous population,
whose population of four million souls was cut in half in the first one hundred years by the brutal first wave of settlers. As their numbers declined, so the number of black faces increased. This was unsurprising since the Portuguese were pioneers of the slave trade in the fifteenth century. Over a third of enslaved Africans would end up in Brazil. The nature of its workforce was largely driven by the country’s size: Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world. Adrift in this immense wilderness, the early settlers couldn’t help but wonder where they were going to find enough people to farm it. The problem would be solved by the newly burgeoning slave trade. The “ebony flesh” that they so desperately needed was sourced from Angola, only forty days away by sea, and thus easily accessible.

Most of these captives were imported because of the exigencies of sugar, which would become the largest and most lucrative commodity produced on its innumerable square acres. These forced migrants brought over to cultivate cane would dwarf the numbers of slaves transported to work in other industries, such as mining or forestry. The eternal significance of the cane crop to this vast nation is memorialized in Sugarloaf Mountain, which dominates the skyline of Rio de Janeiro, and is named after the traditional shape of concentrated refined loaf sugar.

The parallels with the Barbadian experience were marked. As in the earliest years of my island home, Brazil, particularly in new conurbations like Rio, was a frontier society. The early Portuguese colonists were predominantly male, and their amusements were distinctly crude. Brawling was so popular that in 1637 a visiting priest noted that the inhabitants killed one another “
as if they were bedbugs.” And as in Barbados, the territory’s fortunes were transformed by sugar cane, which grew well in the plantations along the coast and fetched a high price as a luxury in Europe. The crop would provide an economic base for this the first permanent modern tropical society in the world. In addition, relations between male Portuguese settlers and both indigenous and slave women were ubiquitous and so great was the need to populate this vast continent that the Church, at least initially, looked the other way at this unbridled miscegenation. The result was a large mixed population that would over time outnumber the white colonists.

When Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1822, slavery continued. But an awareness of abolitionist agitation elsewhere meant
that unrest was inevitable. And in January 1835, a year after emancipation came into effect in the British colonies, the “Bahia Slave Rebellion” erupted. This, the most serious revolt in the country’s history, saw slaves sporting necklaces with the image of the Haitian leader, President Jean Jacques Dessalines, rise up against their abusive masters. The fighting was fierce and swathes of Rio and the northwest burnt. Though the insurrection ultimately failed, the damage was extensive: irrevocably shaking the confidence of the country’s ruling caste. In Brazil, as in the British West Indies, it seemed the rebels’ own efforts (alongside the constant guerrilla incursions made by the vast maroon community) were making it harder and harder for slavery to endure. But when emancipation was finally granted, the efforts of these intrepid souls were conveniently forgotten and abolition was presented as a gift from an avuncular and generous government.

In subsequent years the racist theories that were used to justify the exploitation of its slaves were also used to rationalize the continued mistreatment of Brazil’s black population. So ambivalent would this great nation become about race that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, the white Brazilian elite, inspired by “scientific racism” would promote a national programme of branquemento or “whitening,” which encouraged white migrants to settle in the country, while simultaneously discouraging non–Europeans. At the same time, the authorities actively promoted inter-marriage of locals in an attempt to “lighten up the population.” These warped attitudes persisted and today in Brazil racism and discrimination are institutionalized, and those with darker skins are less likely to receive higher education and access to the professions and more likely to be associated with poverty and criminality. This despite the centrality of the black population to Brazil’s collective identity, which has been evident since the seventeenth century, when the missionary Father Antonio Vieira declared that Brazil had “
the body of America and the soul of Africa” or the pivotal contribution that Afro-Brazilian people have made to that nation’s religion and culture: from food to dance to sport. Meanwhile sugar remains the most lucrative crop produced by that great country, but it has yet to be seen whether the community that historically generated and continues to generate this wealth will receive its rightful stake in Brazil’s thriving economy.

After emancipation, indenture, that “new form of slavery,” continued
to move people around the world, a large percentage of whom were inveigled away from their homelands to cultivate sugar. As well as the thousands of Indians and Chinese transported to the West Indies, the British would also transport thousands of workers to their colonies in the Indian Ocean such as Mauritius. This system would provide the model for other colonies, with French and Dutch planters creating similar systems for their own territories, as would American and African producers, while in Australia indentured Melanesians would do the same. Sugar would thus move workers to places like Natal, Zululand and Mozambique as well as Hawaii, Florida and Texas. It also propelled the migration of numerous other nationalities including the Javanese and Japanese, Filipinos, Madeirans and West Africans. And later the industry would also attract Poles, Czechs and refugees from Hitler’s Germany. But wherever they initially came from, these labourers, just like the white indentured servants enticed to settle in the Americas, went to work in conditions that were little improved since the days before abolition and found that the crop they bent their backs for would dictate the social and economic basis of the societies to which they migrated.

In the twentieth century, sugar has also been implicated in a number of violent struggles. In the 1930s it was the catalyst for the murder of tens of thousands of migrant Haitian workers by the Dominican dictator Trujillo. It also played a role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, since it was Fidel Castro’s appropriation of 70,000 acres of U.S.-held sugar territory on Cuba that, in part, prompted American military action. And despite legal strictures to eliminate it, as the sugar historian Elizabeth Abbott explains, child labour continues to thrive in the sugar world, particularly in El Salvador, Dominica and parts of Brazil. In mainland America, the connection between sugar and forced labour did not end with emancipation. Throughout the first half of the last century, workers in the American sugar industry were exploited shamelessly. In 1942 the abuse of local workers was so egregious that the federal government indicted the United States Sugar Corporation for “peonage” or involuntary servitude, arguing that it transgressed the Third Amendment. So today, in Florida, American workers have been replaced by a steady stream of temporary Caribbean labourers, who are manipulated through their fear of deportation. Paid at rates that would be illegal for American workers, these temporary migrants are forced to subsist on
poor food, have to live in ghastly barrack-style accommodation and are bullied mercilessly by abusive crew bosses. These terrible conditions have been maintained by the “Big Sugar” lobby, which is as busy as ever supporting a system of protectionism, grants and quota levies which effectively pushes foreign-grown sugar out of the United States. Sugar and corruption still seem to go hand in hand.