UN General Assembly
1960

106. The war ended and our economy collapsed. The mistakes made in this country in the distribution of sugar were paid for by us; prices that had risen enormously by the end of the First World War; tremendous boost to production; a sudden drop in prices, ruining the Cuban sugar mills, which quietly fell into the hands of — guess whom — the United States banks, of course, because when Cuban nationals went bankrupt, United States banks became rich; and so it went on until the 1930's. In the search for a formula which would reconcile its interests in ensuring a source of supply with those of its domestic producers, the United States Government set up a quota system. One would have thought that the quotas would be based on the historic contributions of the various sources of supply to the market, and our country's historic contribution to the United States market had been almost 50 per cent. Nevertheless, when the quotas were established, our share was reduced to 28 per cent and the few advantages granted us by that law were successively withdrawn in subsequent legislation. Naturally, the colony depended on the metropolitan country; the economy of the colony had been organized by the metropolitan country; the colony had to be subject to the metropolitan country and if the colony took steps to free itself, the metropolitan Country would take steps to crush it.