Abstract
Cuba’s arrival into modernity progressed together with the sugar industry starting at the dawn of the XIXth century and accelerating in the XXth. The rise of sugar began on the Island’s western regions, favored by historical factors whose benefits had been traditionally denied to the central-eastern provinces. It was not until the beginning of the last century when the latter fully experienced the modernizing effect of sugar industrialization. The specific character and the different nature of this second modernizing surge, implied that the sugar-based modernizing process should adopt traits unheard-of prior to that moment, and the Holguin region would not be an exception. Within the region, Gibara, run by Spanish commercial capital, had developed a sugar plantation economy that monopolized the effects of modernity during the XIXth century. During the two first decades of the next century, that process, encouraged by American and domestic financial capital, branched throughout the region. The development of the sugar monoculture was accompanied by impoverishment of labor, the appropriation of land by the big estates owners, the development of the transport and communications infrastructure, the importation of technologies, the enlargement of the internal market, and the strengthening of the region’s ties with the national and world markets.