Can the pleasure of sweetening our tea with sugar grown by slaves make up for all the misery produced among our fellow creatures, the butchery of the human species by this detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?
There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called sugar. . . . The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans.
The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade.
Today, the world is so awash in sugar - it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy - that it's hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. The West Indies were colonized in a world where sugar was seen as a scarce, luxurious, and profoundly health-giving substance.
We sold sugar with the specific conditions established by American buyers, which in turn dominated the internal market and production in Cuba. Now if we would sell sugar to the U.S., it would be the Cuban Government the one who would sell it, and it would be a complete profit for our people.
NAFTA's been a big problem for sugar.
Negotiating sugar trade in bilateral free trade agreements is a recipe for disaster for the U.S. sugar industry, and it is unnecessary.
Well, the sugar guys have been dealing with NAFTA ever since it passed. Now we've got Mexico dumping sugar that's subsidized by the Mexican government into our market in violation of the World Trade Organization, because NAFTA gave them open access to our sugar market. They claim they're not subsidized, but the government owns half the industry in Mexico.
