Photo: Cuban Sugar Cane Field

PRE-CASTRO CUBA

By Vic Head
Written in 1995

Fresh bullet scars in the window frame at the Royal Palm Hotel in Havana that January day in 1957.  They said the shooting two weeks ago had been suppressed by Batista’s soldiers.  Don’t worry, the revolutionaries were in jail—but of course we worried.  My mission representing Fischer and Porter Company of Warminster (Pennsylvania) was to explore the needs of numerous sugar mills and to track down a complaint.  My wife, Flo, was there to see a bit of Cuba.  Among her tourist bus rides was a trip to Morro Castle, that ancient fortress guarding the Havana harbor, where she saw long unused dungeons and torture chambers.  Together we hiked the waterfront, tossed dimes in for kids to dive after among the spiny sea-urchins, and sipped 3 cent demitasse cups of sweet syrupy espresso.  We were told that a boy from Spain had arrived several years ago with two dollars in his pocket.  Cubans generally hated Spaniards, but he had worked and saved and started the business which had made him a millionaire several times over, with an outdoor espresso bar in the middle of every block in downtown Havana.  One night we enjoyed the beautiful dancing entertainment at the Tropicana, but our eyes popped when we wandered into the casino and watched a man plunking down on the roulette table a seemingly endless supply of $500 U. S. bills—no wins—no emotion.

At Central Toledo, the largest sugar mill in Cuba, I checked out some flowmeters which I had designed to pass the stray fibers left in the raw juice after crushing the cane.  Chief Engineer Jeronimo Diaz Compaign told me these were the first raw juice meters to run a full season without plugging, but “Meestaire Head, we would be pleased to have you explain why they are in error by 15 percent,” and he loaded me with data to study.

Nights in Havana were nearly sleepless, for a hundred or more intersections had no traffic signs, and drivers blasted their horns continuously.  The cacophony tortured us until 3:30 a.m.  Then when we had begun to doze, trash pickup began and I swear the men took delight in hurling the emptied metal cans across the street.

A concrete highway, one lane each way, ran 550 miles from Havana in the flat land of western Cuba to the far eastern Santiago de Cuba ringed by the Caribbean Sea on the south and by the Sierra Maestras.  Pepe, our Cuban representative, drove us 220 miles on this road to Jatibonico.  Every ten or fifteen miles a huge sign PELIGRO! warned of DANGER!  Batista using your tax dollars to keep the highway in good repair.  A deep pit one lane wide and fifty feet long appeared, but no workers in sight.  Pepe told us Batista’s fictitious payroll cost taxpayers each year as much as the total cost to construct the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  I should say that Pepe was sometimes given to exaggeration, but conveyed the truth that Batista was “robbing the people blind,” not only through taxes, but also with atrocious odds in the daily national lottery.

At intervals we saw the shack of a squatter family, in the corner of a cane field where a brook would cross under the highway.  Walls of scrap lumber, sheet metal, and palm fronds reminded us of the “Hoovervilles” here in the U.S.A. during the Great Depression.  Only holes for doors and windows.  Each squatter family was industrious, raising chickens and vegetables, bartering any excess with a passing bus driver who brought them milk and other necessities from town.

Overnight at a beautiful ivy-covered hotel in Santa Clara brought delicious sleep at last until at first light a raucous screaming began—hundreds of parakeets perched in the ivy.
Pepe left us a few days in the gracious care of the chief engineer of the sugar mill called Central Jatibonico, and his wife.  We ate at their home and slept in a screen-walled cottage on mill property.  The chief engineer explained needs for possible improvement in mill operation while his wife showed Flo the beautiful little village with its unpaved side streets.

Pepe returned and drove us back to Havana for an overnight stay with his family.  We met a former shoemaker from Jamaica who was teaching Pepe’s children English—strange at first to hear a black man speaking perfect English with a decidedly British accent.  Pepe’s wife and mother were busy with the children and with handicrafts, so Flo and I went off for an afternoon stay at a beach we had all to ourselves.  But how they upbraided us—Swimming!?  In January!?

Three months at home in Hatboro (Pennsylvania), Señor Compaign’s mill data was no help regarding the 15% error mystery, but I returned in April with far overweight suitcases of hardware.  Havana Airport customs gave me a hard time—was a bribe in order?  But as a senior officer let me explain that I was selling nothing, only wanting to do some experimenting at several sugar mills.

Pepe had left his car in Santiago de Cuba so we flew—my first and only flight in a turboprop plane.  Below us after dark vast cane fields were ablaze and Pepe explained that, away from towns, revolutionaries were getting out of control.  I’ve learned since that it is routine to burn the dry leaves from the cane just before harvesting, so I guess Pepe was having his fun with this gullible gringo.

At last we were over the Sierra Maestras where somewhere in the wilderness Fidel Castro and his little group were hiding out.  Then the sparkle of city lights and the airport.

Graffiti everywhere—REVOLUTION! scrawled or printed in chalk or paint, and no cleaning it up.  On the hotel porch men sat talking, but an aura of silence followed me until Pepe explained that I was from Estados Unidos, and then talk of the impending revolution became loud and free, and I was glad Flo was home in Hatboro.

“How do you feel about our revolution?"  I assured them that Franklin Roosevelt’s non-intervention policy of 1934 required Washington to respect any existing government, while we private citizens could only share their prayers that the monster Batista would be overthrown.  True, Batista had covered billboards throughout the island asserting that Castro would bring communism, but what utter nonsense!  Hadn’t the Catholic Church given Castro sanctuary and helped him escape the island a few years earlier?

That night as I turned in, thoughts of sugar mill technology fled.  In imagination I juxtaposed three visions:  the filthy-rich man at the Tropicana roulette table, the squalor of the squatter children, and the graffiti and the free talk here in Santiago de Cuba.  Yes, it is coming—revolution!  Surely it must come—revolution!  But how long?  Tonight?  A week?  A year?  In their lingo, revolucion!  REVOLUCION!  On and on until I dozed at last.

Pepe’s plan after our turboprop flight from Havana to Santiago de Cuba was to pick up his car and spend several days visiting numerous sugar mills along the south shore where my experimental equipment could be installed.  But Pepe left me in the hotel one afternoon, explaining that a worn-out Coca Cola bottling plant had been purchased for a song, that the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics would soon have it operable and that there might be some business.  He’d be back shortly.

Night came.  Ate alone.  Midnight, no Pepe.  Next day I didn’t dare leave the room except for wolfed meals, for fear I’d miss a phone call.  Another day, more of the same.  I was alternately chewing nails and sweating blood.  Nights alone were frightful, as the clomp-clomp-clomp of the boots of a Batista soldier patrolled each cobblestone street.  He would keep to the center, fearing ambush from any doorway on either side.
On the third day, I decided that Pepe could just as well wait for me as I for him, and I took a bus out to San Juan Hill.  I had promised my wife Flo that I would go there to look for her father’s name on the circle of bronze “books” that were a monument to U. S. soldiers who, along with some of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” had been killed or wounded in the Spanish-American War.  He had been left for dead on the edge of a swamp by the Spaniards, and rescued a few days later when the tide of battle turned.  Perhaps because of some confusion between first and second names I never found his, but the monument was shaded by low overhanging trees and I sat for some hours on the quiet hilltop, lost in the contemplation of history.

Back at the hotel, still no word, and I was in the midst of my evening meal when Pepe bursts in, all aglow with the success at the bottling works.  I never did find out where he had really been—some meeting of revolutionary plotters?  But this I do know, that at every sugar mill in Cuba, everyone from the humblest janitor to the millionaire mill owner was praying for Castro’s success and the wealthiest were financing him.

Pepe retrieved his car, and after some other joint business we started north and west over the beautiful mountains.  Once we were stopped by a road block where several Batista soldiers took twenty minutes searching the car for guns and ammo that might be delivered to other hot spots farther west, or so they feared.  Again, I wondered whether a bribe would have cut the delay time, which seemed excessive.

We took about a week, visiting many mills approached by gravel roads south of the highway and near the coast, before Pepe left me in Havana again to see what I could do for Central Toledo.  Chief Engineer Jeronimo Diaz Compaign was cordial and gave me an hour of his time, with delight at our meter performance and the hope we could find our 15% error.  I checked and found and corrected a ½% misalignment, and then started looking for their error.  Over a two week period I checked everything that went into and out of that mill.

From the bus to mill headquarters, I noticed the rows of tiny cottages, perhaps 12 feet square, where workers and their families lived, all within the mill property fence.  It was a whole village, complete with recreation facilities, small stores, and a very large combined school and church.  The cottages were only four feet apart, but each family surrounded its house with flowers, with more in window boxes.

I started in with the laboratory.  Chief Chemist Alvarez had naturally popping eyes, and when I told him of my intention to do a complete mass balance, it was a sight to see when he rolled those eyes and declared I would be wasting my time.  He assured me he had done the same himself, and that our meters worked beautifully but were in error by 15 percent.
A mass-balance means that the weight of everything, however, trivial, coming into the plant must equal everything going out, but the sugar coming in depended on the weight of cane and its typical juice yield, together with the inferred concentration of sugar dissolved in the juice.  That was my first attack, and Alvarez was very helpful in demonstrating how independent checks with gadgets called hydrometers and polarimeter gave precisely equal independent measures.  The crushed cane went over an endless weighing belt before it was burned in the powerhouse boiler.  Truck loads of mud from the juice settling tanks and filters were weighed before they drove away.  Yes, the weights of empty trucks were properly accounted for.  Out at the railroad weighing scale I watched as the scale man, who smiled with pride as he balanced the beam, recorded the weights of twelve successive freight cars of cane.  I even went up on the roof where a four-foot duct discharged waste steam.  By tossing papers in and watching how fast they shot up I got a fair estimate of equivalent water escaping, then there was the molasses from the evaporator, measured by the drum, so many drums per day, shipped to the Bacardi rum distillers.  And finally of course the clean-room where the white sugar filled sacks on scales to the 100 pound labeled weight.

Despair!  That 15% still stared me in the face.  As I left an evening movie which I had scarcely watched, a possible spark turned on, and I took a late-night bus back to the mill.  At the railroad weighing house I copied down the entire day’s log of freight car weights.  They jumped all over the place from 23,000 to 29,000 pounds all day and all night, averaging 26,000, all except the twelve cars I had watched them weigh, which ran 30,000 give or take a couple of hundred!  There was the fifteen percent glaring at me at last.  Sunday morning I phoned the chief engineer at his home and told him I had found the error.  Before I could elaborate, he said to save it.  He would meet me at his office at 3:00 p.m.  I knew the offices and laboratory would be devoid of people, and perhaps I had been reading too many Perry Masons or perhaps it was the tense mood of revolution in the air, but I wrote to Flo, “If I’m not home by Tuesday night, call the American Embassy in Havana.”

Well, I went through the dark laboratory past unlighted office doors and finally I was sitting with Señor Compaign, showing my 24-hour record of the freight cars.  He placed his fingertips together in a professional way and, raising his voice, said, “Well, Meestair Head, WE ARE VERY GRATEFUL IF YOU HAVE DISCOVERED THAT SOMEONE EES STEALING THEE CANE.”  Then in a voice so low it was little more than a whisper, “Let me show you something.”  And he pulled out an almost invisible drawer and showed me a bar chart covering 100% of the cost of a bag of sugar—so much for growing the cane, land rental and labor, mill labor, laboratory and executives’ salaries, etc. etc., final costs adding up to 96% of the sale price.  “And then,” he whispered, “Batista takes his taxes and leaves the owner and stockholders practically nothing.  Meestair Head, can you do nothing?  Your meters are intended to be part of our accounting.”  I assured him that Alvarez and his assistants had watched while I had made small adjustments, explaining to them my every move, and that at a word from him they could do what was needful.  It seems that the sugar bags labeled 100 pounds actually held 115 pounds, and cooperative customers paid by check for 100 pounds and cash under the counter for the extra fifteen.