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cents per pound. The result was general prosperity and contentment. Since then the prices have risen and fallen through frequent changes and a wide range, and they are once more high enough to make the planter and manufacturer happy. But the average price and profit for any series of recent years have not been such as to encourage investment in the industry, and those engaged in it are only too conscious of the fact that their prosperity rests upon a very unstable basis. There are those who look for relief of Cuba's difficulties in the cessation of the European bounties, and a complete solution of them in annexation to the United States, but either contingency is a slender dependence.

CHAPTER X

CUBA'S TOBACCO INDUSTRY

CUBA's tobacco has a great advantage over her sugar in the facts that it can always command a good price and is beyond the reach of competition in the matter of quality. Every likely soil and climate in the world has been tried in the effort to produce a leaf similar to that grown in the fields of the celebrated Vuelta Abajo. Even though seeds from the best Cuban plants have been used, the results have never approached the object sought. What is commonly known as "Havana" tobacco stands alone without a rival or any satisfactory substitute.

One of the peculiarities of the tobacco plant is that a very slight change in the conditions under which it is grown will effect a considerable change in the character of the leaf produced. Plants raised in soils composed of precisely the same chemical ingredients will yield quite different tobacco when those ingredients happen to be present in varying proportions.

In Cuba, as elsewhere, it is no uncommon thing to find tobacco of the highest grade upon a piece of land within a stone's throw of another field where only the poorest quality of leaf can be produced. This is a fact that should be remembered by prospective purchasers of advertised Cuban lands. Promotion companies and agents frequently offer tobacco acreage at high prices, which they justify by statements of the production of adjacent vegas. Often the purchaser finds himself in possession of a worthless tract lying alongside of one which is yielding handsome profits to its owner. There is very little land in the tobacco districts of Pinar del Rio which has not been tried out and it is not safe to buy anything unless it is actually in cultivation. In Oriente there is plenty of good tobacco land available, but up to the present it has not been made to produce a grade of leaf equal to what is termed partidos.

Tobacco is raised in the most widely separated parts of the earth and in the most diversified climates. The world's annual crop of the leaf approximates 2,000,000,000 pounds with a value in the raw state of about $225,000,000. Of this volume, Cuba produces no

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