Matanzas reflected in many ways the tumultous metamorphosis that took place in Cuban society, economy, and culture during the nineteenth century. In 1774 it had a population of slightly more than 3,000 mostly rural inhabitants, amounting to less than 2 percent of the total island population. Then came the sugar revolutions to change the old order throughout the island. The magnificent hardwood forests gave way to impressive fields of meticulously cultivated sugarcane surrounding carefully constructed, hardwood-fueled ingenios. Independent small farmers yielded to increasingly wealthy hacendados controlling ever more vast domains and supervising the energetic labor of a growing army of restless African slaves supplemented by a variegated salaried work force. By 1860 Matanzas became the center of sugar production in Cuba, contributing more than 55 percent of the island’s total sugar export with slightly less than 8 percent of the land area and slightly more than 15 percent of the total population (although more than 27 percent of the slaves).
Basing his work on national and local archives, Laird Bergad has carefully reconstructed the changes that took place in the regional society, economy, and culture during the nineteenth century. He delineates three phases. In the first phase between 1800 and 1837 sugar (and, briefly, coffee) progressively devoured and devastated the extensive forests and grazing belts. After 1816, with a fee-simple real estate market, aggressive entrepreneurs invaded the Matanzas area. These entrepreneurs were composed of three groups that soon became interrelated through marriage and common commercial interests: old established Havana families, some with recently acquired titles of nobility; peninsular bureaucrats resident in Matanzas; and recent immigrants from Spain, the United States, and elsewhere. Modern technology, intensive capital, and vastly expanded sugar production characterized the second phase of the transformations between 1837 and 1878. The third phase, which occupied the interwar years of 1878-97, was marked by the abolition of slavery in 1886, by changes in agriculture (ingenios gradually gave way to central factories and independent, specialized cane farmers), and by changes in the founding generation of the Matanzas agricultural revolution through death, political exile, destruction of property, or shifts in economic interest.
Cuban Rural Society is unusually rich in facts and figures, placing the local developments of Matanzas within the context of the wider island developments. It is slightly marred, however, by a disconcertingly cavalier style, an excessive dependence on Spanish words and phrases, some debatable interpretations, and an inadequate index.
