The Super Bowl halftime show began with what looked like a scene from Macbeth, but instead of Birnam Wood coming to life and storming the field, it was a sugar cane field.
This was part of the show’s ode to Puerto Rican culture. Sugar cane fields used to be a big part of Puerto Rico, but there’s almost none grown on the island now. Sugar cane provides an evocative episode in the island’s history.
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There are plenty of reasons for the rise and fall of sugar in Puerto Rico, and many of them have to do with government policies intended to subsidize major business interests.
In fact, Puerto Rico and sugar cane intersect with crony capitalism in many ways. Here are two:
Puerto Ricans were rare among Caribbean people in that you wouldn’t find them in the sugar cane fields of Florida in the 1940s and 50s. Why not?
Because cutting sugar cane absolutely sucked. The horribleness of the labor is a big reason the industry left the island — a farm owner would have to pay such high wages to induce workers that it became unprofitable.
For these reasons, the only people who would cut cane in Florida were exploited foreign workers. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up the British West Indies program to import foreign guest workers. The advantage of the foreign guest workers (for the farmers) was that they couldn’t complain because then they would get deported.
Puerto Ricans couldn’t be deported, so they were not as exploitable.
“The vast difference between the Bahama Island labor and domestic, including Puerto Rican,” one farmer wrote in a letter to the U.S. Department of Education, “is that labor transported from the Bahama Islands can be deported and sent home, if it does not work, which cannot be done in the instance of labor from domestic United States or Puerto Rico.”
Here’s a second cronyism story about Puerto Rico and sugar: A main reason sugar got big in Puerto Rico in the 20th Century was corporate welfare. The United States created a protectionist sugar program that barred the importation of foreign-grown sugar. This created extra incentive for Puerto Ricans to grow sugar and sell it to the U.S.
It’s good that there is no more Puerto Rican sugar.