At the same time, directly or indirectly but decisively, it spurred the growth of Dutch, French, English and US industry. The long sugar cycle generated a prosperity as mortal as the prosperity generated by the silver and gold of Potosi, Ouro Preto, Zacatecas and Guanajuato. The land was devastated by this selfish plant which invaded the New World, felling forests, squandering natural fertility and destroying accumulated soil humus. Legions of slaves came from Africa to provide King Sugar with the prodigal, wageless labour force he required: human fuel for the burning. Canefields were planted in the warm, damp littoral of northeast Brazil then in the Caribbean islands – Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Puerto Rico – and in Veracruz and the Peruvian coast, which proved to be ideal terrain for the “white gold”. For almost three centuries after the discovery of America no agricultural product had more importance for European commerce than American sugar. It was sold in pharmacies, weighed out by the gram. Grown and refined on a small scale in Sicily, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands, and purchased in the Orient at high prices, sugar was so precious to Europeans that it figured in the dowries of queens. To the Admiral’s joy they took hold rapidly.

Undoubtedly gold and silver were the main motivating force in the Conquest, but Columbus on his second voyage brought the first sugarcane roots from the Canary Islands and planted them in what is now the Dominican Republic. King sugar and other agricultural monarchs This is a lightly edited excerpt from Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press, 1997 ) by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Cedric Belfrage. He returned to Montevideo in 1985 and died there on 13 April 2015.

When that country fell to a coup, his name was added to the death squad lists and he was forced to flee to Spain. In 1973, after a coup in Uruguay, Galeano was imprisoned and later went into exile in Argentina.

Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Ĭonsidered a literary giant of Latin America’s Left, Eduardo Galeano was a novelist and journalist who wrote extensively about oppression and resistance in Latin America.

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Open veins of america