Producción en masa del azúcar cubano, 1899–1929: Economías de escala y elección de técnicas

Technological changes gave Cuba one of the most technically advanced cane sugar industries in the world in the first part of this century. In this paper, we show quantitatively that production techniques in sugar manufacturing, as in many other processing industries, underwent enormous increases in their optimal scales due to the adoption of continuous-processing technologies and mass production. These same continuous-processing technologies were those which heralded the managerial revolution à la Chandler. In Cuba, the large turn-of-the-century sugar enterprise, to take a global perspective, was not the latifundio of antiquity; it was an element of the large industrial enterprise of the twentieth century, and it was a mark of global participation and industrial leadership in the newly transformed techniques of sugar manufacture.