Word: sugar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Slums. Puerto Rico nowadays is an exciting, sunny, scrubbed and cultured place to be. In terrain, it is a blue central mountain range skirted with rustling fields of sugar cane, crisscrossed with winding blacktop roads; the land is dotted with clean villages that still have the Spanish colonial look. The island would fit tidily inside Connecticut. With a population of 2,300,000, Puerto Rico is as crowded as the U.S. would be if all the people in the world were packed into...
...reform instead of independence. He urged voters to "lend me your vote" rather than sell it to the opposition. His followers called him El Vate (The Bard) and elected him to office. In those days, needlewomen who worked at home in the island's second biggest industry after sugar were getting just 3? for hemming a dozen handkerchiefs...
...beginnings, nonetheless, were undeniably socialist. A Land Authority began to enforce an old law limiting corporate sugar holdings to 500 acres, broke up the big mainland-owned companies, formed collective-like "proportional profit" cane plantations. A TVA-style Water Resources Authority took over power production from several private power companies, and began wide-scale irrigation as well. Using $10.7 million in treasury funds, Fomento built or took over factories to make cement, glass and cardboard (for rum bottles and cases), shoes, tile...
...Fifth Avenue, striding down a corridor on his way for some "belly-to-belly selling" of a businessman interested in setting up a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico. "We have learned," he says, "that the U.S. businessmen we deal with today are as different from the plantation and sugar-mill colonials as we ourselves are from malaria-ridden serfs...
...factories (of the 667 that started) have gone under for such reasons as obsoletion of market, lack of distributing facilities, attempting to make a product exclusively for the still relatively small Puerto Rican market. The government, too, had its failures. The Land Authority tried valiantly, even mechanized sugar loading by a system that blows the semirefined product from trucks or railroad cars., into ships, eliminating bags. But it could not meet its allotted task of increasing output of sugar, and its lands and plants may be sold to local capitalists if they will agree to mechanize harvesting, keep wages...