386 / 540
385
Vicini Cánepa established the Italia sugar plantation, which extended over nearly 800 hectares in Yaguate,
Caoba Corcovada, San Cristóbal, and nearby Nizao. The most sophisticated in the country, it featured mechan-
ical equipment manufactured by the French company Fives-Lille and a sugar production capacity of 3,000 tons
daily, as well as a still that produced 3,000 liters of rumdaily to which honey produced on the hacienda was added.
For the shipments of sugar, he built a port in Palenque and a 12-kilometer railway
28
for which he also
supplied trains and cargo wagons. These investments contributed to reducing the cost of transportation so
that more essential activities could be prioritized, an approach that enabled him to compete with experienced
manufacturers and international competitors owned by families such as the Basses (Alexander and his son
William), who had set up the Consuelo Mill in San Pedro de Macorís.
He rescued production units that had gone bankrupt as a consequence of the drop in the price of sugar
on the international market in 1883 and 1884, which was due to the excess supply of subsidized beet sugar in
European countries
29
and to the lack of management and capital needed to import and install new production
technologies.
His principal competition was the Bass family. Alexander Bass had been an engineer in Cuba, and in 1890
he operated as an agent for a company in Brooklyn, New York. An entrepreneur with knowledge and expe-
rience in the marketing of sugar and other products in international markets, his main mill was the Central
Consuelo in San Pedro de Macorís, valued at GBP 700,000.
To compete successfully in the sugar business, Vicini Cánepa incorporated the modern principles and rules
of good business, and to take advantage of the most favorable sugar prices in foreign markets, he concentrated
sales in the marketing office that he had set up and operated in New York.
As for the capitalization of the sugar industry, Eugenio M. de Hostos calculated the value of farms and
mills at US$21,088,750 in 1884, including eighteen in the south of the country, which he estimated to be worth
US$11.8 million,
30
an amount that was financed by foreign direct investment.
With these data and other information, I have estimated the value of the Vicini Cánepa mills (Angelina,
Azuano, Italia, and Ocoa) at US$2,622,224, production units that, in wages for labor, annually circulated ap-
proximately US$356,000.
31
These units contributed a quarter of the total sugar supply, exploiting an area of 933 hectares (12.2
cabal-
lerías
equivalent to 1200
tareas
) of the 4,200 hectares (55
caballerías
) in production when they operated eighteen
haciendas along the southern coast of the country.
32
Considering the productivity of 600 pounds of sugar per
tarea
of cane cultivated and taken to the mills,
I estimate that the 933 hectares
33
of cane at Vicini Cánepa’s haciendas and mills produced 8,784,000 pounds
(4,392 tons) of sugar per year, equivalent to a little more than one-fifth of the average total volume of sugar
exported by the country from 1881 to 1890.
Italian Investments in Railways and Trains
The initial goal for investments in trains and railways was not to expand the activities of buying and selling
in the domestic market, although it did have that effect, but rather to speed up and make more efficient the
transporting of sugar and other agricultural produce to port for their ultimate export.
The reduction in the cost of transportation, and the increase in productivity in the production and both
internal and external marketing of agricultural products, which were benefits generated by investments in
trains and railroads, contributed significantly to the separation of sugar manufacturing from more generalized
agricultural economies.
The British were able to provide train service from the port of Sánchez with the income generated by im-
port and export tariffs on agricultural and other produce being transported via railroad. The railroads, includ-
ing the Samaná-Santiago line, increased the tonnage of products transported from the fields to the shipping
ports, as indicated in the following table representing the early years of the twentieth century.
ITALIAN INVESTMENT IN THE MODERN DOMINICAN ECONOMY