Cuba

Cuba is presented as a case of prosperity built on extraction: its sugar economy made the island one of the world’s richest places in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even as a small planter elite controlled political power and assets and the enslaved majority had no rights. The contrast shows how economic growth under extractive institutions could occur without broad prosperity or a path open to everyone.

Cuba in the plantation economy

The book places Cuba alongside Barbados, Haiti, and Jamaica as Caribbean plantation societies in which most people were enslaved and worked under harsh conditions, while a small planter minority held all political power and owned the assets, including the enslaved population. The elite’s property was protected even as the majority lacked rights. Cuba’s place in this comparison is therefore not simply that of a successful exporter: it exemplifies an economic order that secured wealth and political control for one group by excluding the rest.

Sugar, exports, and concentrated wealth

The plantations produced sugar for sale in world markets. That export trade made the Caribbean islands, including Cuba, among the richest places in the world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book’s account distinguishes this aggregate wealth from inclusive prosperity: the gains rested on institutions that savagely exploited most of the population, rather than on broadly shared rights or opportunities.

The limits of extractive growth

The plantation economy stagnated when it needed to shift toward new economic activities. Such a transition threatened both the planter elite’s incomes and its political power, creating a barrier to change even when economic growth depended on it. Cuba thus illustrates the book’s distinction between growth that extractive institutions can produce and prosperity sustained through institutions that allow wider participation: sugar exports could enrich the ruling minority, but the structure that concentrated those gains also restricted the economy’s capacity to change.