Cuba agricola: mito y tradition, 1878-1920

摘要

In reporting on the first year of operation of the experimental agronomic station in Santiago de las Vegas, in Havana's rural hinterland, the Cuban agricultural reformer Francisco Cruz remarked that' the happy period has now passed when with pride we could say that Cuba was a promised land, over which it was sufficient to cast the seed in order to harvest shortly afterwards tasty, exquisite and abundant fruit' (Cuba agricola, p. 45). By the late nineteenth century, it had become evident just how severe the ecological cost of 'traditional' approaches to sugarcane and tobacco cultivation, in particular, had been. Soil exhaustion had resulted in diminishing returns on land that had been the richest throughout the preceding century, and this stimulated the push to research and apply the latest in scientific advances in order to tackle the problem of increasing yields and compensate for the erosion in soil quality.