Excerpt from The History of Cuba, Vol. 3 Sugar had long been the greatest source of Cuban wealth. It was always the sugar planter who had social as well as financial prestige on the island. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century even the poorest and smallest of sugar plantations had yielded a profit of a year while the larger and more prosperous ones had cleared even as high as annually. And all this had been accomplished with a minimum of effort. Vast areas Of Cuba at this period were given over to these plantations. Some estates devoted them selves exclusively to raising the cane, while others ran mills which ground the cane and prepared the product for sale as sugar. Particularly with the soil as it was then, unravished by revolution, with its original fertility unim paired, it was rarely necessary to replant the sugar cane. The old sprouts came up year after year, yielding at least two crops a year without any necessity for disturb ing or enriching the soil. In 1800 Cuba exported tons of sugar; and in 1850 no less than tons. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.