The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-01-23

The grinding season begins in De- cember ahd continues until May or June. This is the period of greatest activity in Cuba. The people are busy and nobody expects any trouble. After the sugar crop is disposed of, then the wise ones look out for trouble. In the sugar cane fields the Cuban farm laborer becomes skilled in the use of the machete, a skill which he has more than once turned to dread full account in war. The machete is a great. powerful knife which looks like a cross between big carving knife and a butchers cleaver. There is a trick in It's use which is acquired only with long practice in the cane fields. With the first few strokes the machete takes away the tops and leaves the naked stalk of the cane. One power- full blow fells that, and the sugar laden cane is ready to be piled on a drag, to be pulled away to the rail- way to be lifted on a car by steam derrick always attached to the tram way engine, and then to be carried to the crushers at the mill.
 Negroes are in vast majority in the cane fields. Negroes are in the majority in the population of the whole island, and by their economic pressure they actually control the su- gar business. They do not share in the profits of an extraordinarily suc- cessful year, perhaps but At-is Within their power at any time to turn the seasons work into disaster. In the last election the race, question was the one vital issue. The negroes be- lieve they have won a victory. If, under the new republic. the negro vot- CTS shall be disappointed, the sugar planters of Cuba may well be prepared for trouble.
 In the mills the laborers are ne- groes, Spaniards, Chinese coolies and highly-paid American mechanics and engineers. Young college men from the States watch the manufacture and apply a knowledge of practical chem istry to every process, forcing science to pay It's tribute to energy in coin of the realm. The machinery of the larger plantation mills is new and up- to-date. Everything that American money can buy and Yankee ingenuity can devise has been added to the Cu- ban sugar mill equipment since the beginning of the American industrial invasion of 1899. Yet with all these things, the system of conducting a sugar central has not been changed in the slightest degree. The ideas of the people have not been changd. Cubans declare that when all else in the island has been thoroughly Anglo Saxonized, and when all else that is peculiarly Latin has perished, the sue gar central still will be Cuban in every essential
 Yet American methods have extend ed the acreage devoted to sugar cane and have increased the output of the mills. The statistics show steady increase ever since the Americans came to the island, an increase which was not affected even by the revo- lutiOn of 1906 which caused the United States to resume provisional govern ment in the republic.
 Almost all the lands of Cuba are adapted to the growing of sugar cane The Cuban land is so fertile that it will grow sugar cane of fair quality for twenty years from one planting and without any fertilization. The improved methods of farming do not permit such long growths, but it is still quite possible. Frequent re- plantings, that is frequent for Cuba, with the use of fertilizer and with