'Sugar⟫ warehouses in the port of Havana, 1840-1880

At the end of the 18th century, the massive arrival of enslaved Africans prompted the sugar boom in Cuba. As the plantation economy was implemented, the demograph-ic structure and the commercial dynamics of the island suffered profound transfor-mations. Since the decade of 1840, during the consolidation of the Second Slavery in Cuba, a new port complex emerged in Havana Bay: warehouses. The new sugar warehouses were replicated in other settlements of the island, increasingly connected to the export of commodities. This paper examines how the logistic system of the agro-industrial sugar complex, whose epicenter was located in the port of Havana, was organized. A logistic system that was articulated on three axes: the expansion of the railroad, steam navigation, and warehouses. All that allowed the establishment of a commercial sugar geography in Western Cuba, increasingly interconnected with capitalist world-economy. The << sugar >> warehouses built in Havana during this period emulated the warehousing system, which had already been successfully implemented in the North-Atlantic ports of London and Liverpool. Only in the Bay of Havana, five companies -with their respective port infrastructures (wharfs, warehouses, cranes, etc.)- were in operation in the second half of the 19th century, competing for the control of commercial traffic. The subsequent evolution was conditioned by the so-cio-economic effects of the world crises of 1857 and 1866, as well as by the insertion of monopolistic interests and transnational capital in the Cuban economy, in the con-text of the depletion and dissolution of the Second Slavery.