Orwell in Puerto Rico: Congress 'Promises' a New Dictatorship

 The United States “liberated” Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898. Within 12 years, the United States had also liberated its farmland, with an agribusiness model that converted a diversified island harvest (coffee, sugarcane, tobacco, tropical fruit) into a one-crop, cash-cow economy… that of sugarcane. The US sugarcane plantations were rapidly consolidated into enormous centrales, and four centralesalone—United Porto Rico Sugar, Fajardo, Aguirre, South Porto Rico Sugar—controlled 160,000 acres of Puerto Rican farmland. As early as 1910, 45 centraleswere already producing 98 percent of the island’s sugar.