Puerto Rican Coffee Under American Rule (1898-1950)

Coffee pickers near Corozal, Puerto Rico, 1941

Coffee pickers near Corozal, Puerto Rico, December 1941. Photo: Jack Delano, U.S. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsa-8a37457. No known restrictions.

Summary

When Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, coffee was the island's leading export, sold mainly to Cuba, Spain and other European buyers. Within a few years it had lost most of those advantages. Spain and Cuba began charging duty on Puerto Rican coffee. The United States, which had charged no general duty on coffee since 1872, offered no protected market in their place. Hurricane San Ciriaco struck in 1899. Sugar, which could now be sold in the United States free of duty, became the main export. Coffee did not disappear. It remained Puerto Rico's second export until the First World War, and in 1949 almost 25,000 farms still grew it. But two more hurricanes, the Depression and a post-war policy built around factories left it a far smaller industry than it had been in the 1890s.

Coffee in 1898

On the eve of the U.S. invasion, coffee exports were worth nearly three times as much as sugar exports, according to figures compiled by the historian Luis Alberto Lugo Amador. The 1896 harvest, the largest of the period, yielded nearly 59 million pounds of coffee for export.

Most of that coffee was sold within the Spanish empire. In 1895, Cuba bought 35.6% of the island's coffee exports and Spain 24.2%. France, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Germany were the other important buyers. In Spain, Puerto Rican coffee was what most people drank: in 1896 it made up 95.7% of the coffee Spain imported, and it entered the country practically free of duty. Its "Yauco" and "caracolillo" grades were among the most expensive coffees on the world market, second in price only to Mocha.

Markets Lost After 1898

The Treaty of Paris, signed on 10 December 1898, transferred Puerto Rico to the United States. From then on, the island's coffee was a foreign product in the markets that had bought most of it.

Spain. From 1899, Puerto Rican coffee paid full duty to enter Spain: 1,868,490 pesetas in duties in 1899 and 2,146,701 pesetas in 1901. Lugo Amador found that no other coffee paid such high duties in the Spanish market. In 1897 Puerto Rico had supplied 92.7% of the coffee Spain imported; by 1900 its share, measured by value, was 11.3%. It recovered to between 20% and 28.5% in 1902–1918, but never regained its old dominance.

Cuba. After 1898 Cuba quadrupled its coffee duty, to $12.25 per 100 kilograms. The U.S. military government then in Cuba set a reduced rate of $3.40 for Puerto Rican coffee, a little more than it had paid before 1898. Cuba remained the island's largest customer: in 1917 Cuban buyers took 59.3% of Puerto Rico's coffee exports.

France. In 1907 France announced that it would apply its maximum duty to Puerto Rican coffee. An agreement with the United States that year kept the lower rate in place.

The United States. The U.S. duty on coffee had been abolished on 1 July 1872, so coffee from Brazil and other producers entered the United States free, and Puerto Rican coffee gained no advantage there. Growers asked Washington for a duty on foreign coffee; a large assembly of growers and merchants in Ponce in 1908 asked for six cents a pound. The Taft administration declined. The U.S. market bought little of the island's coffee: in the fiscal year 1905–06, shipments to the mainland were worth $27,069, or 0.7% of the coffee exported that year. Some observers of the time remarked that in Europe the market, the reputation and the public's taste were already established, while in North America everything remained to be done.

Hurricane San Ciriaco struck on 8 August 1899, with severe effects on the coffee harvests (see Hurricane San Ciriaco and the Coffee Collapse (1899)). In 1901 the island exported only about 12.2 million pounds of coffee, worth $1.7 million, roughly a fifth of the 1896 volume.

How historians weigh the causes. Historians have given four main explanations: the 1899 hurricane, the loss of tariff protection in Spain and Cuba, the lack of any protection in the United States, and competition from South American coffee. Lugo Amador agrees that these explain much of the decline. He also argues that many Puerto Ricans of the time soon concluded that the island's absorption into the U.S. tariff system did more harm to coffee than the hurricane did.

The Foraker Act of 1900

The Foraker Act, approved on 12 April 1900 and in force from 1 May 1900, gave Puerto Rico a civil government and set its terms of trade.

Goods imported into Puerto Rico from foreign countries paid the same duties as goods entering the United States. Coffee was singled out: coffee imported into Puerto Rico paid five cents a pound. That duty applied to coffee coming in; it did nothing for the coffee Puerto Rico sold abroad.
Trade between Puerto Rico and the United States paid 15% of the normal duties at first. These duties were to end once the island set up its own system of taxes, and in no case later than 1 March 1902. Free trade with the United States began in 1901.
The coasting trade between Puerto Rico and the United States was placed under U.S. coastwise shipping law.
The Puerto Rican peso was withdrawn and exchanged at 60 U.S. cents.

Shipping Rules and the "Jones Act"

Two different laws are called the Jones Act, and they are often confused. The Jones Act of 1917, also called the Jones–Shafroth Act, made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, whose Section 27 is also known as the Jones Act, requires cargo moving between U.S. ports to travel on ships that are U.S.-built, U.S.-owned and U.S.-crewed.

Puerto Rico had been under U.S. coastwise shipping law since 1900, under the Foraker Act, twenty years before the 1920 law. These rules cover trade between U.S. ports. In this period most Puerto Rican coffee went to foreign buyers in Cuba and Europe. This encyclopedia found no source showing that shipping rules were a main cause of coffee's decline.

Sugar Takes First Place

Sugar, by contrast, could now be sold in the United States free of duty, and the U.S. market could absorb all of it. Within a few years of 1898 sugar had become the island's main export. Lugo Amador describes the Puerto Rico of the early twentieth century as becoming an enormous sugar factory aimed almost entirely at the U.S. market. In his assessment, U.S. authorities in Washington and in San Juan showed little interest in coffee. Proposals for a loan to coffee growers failed: the island's Executive Council left the first one unvoted in 1901 and vetoed another in 1907.

Coffee nevertheless held second place among the island's exports until the First World War, and its name still carried weight. Roasters in Barcelona and elsewhere sold cheaper coffees from other countries as "café de Puerto Rico", a practice the U.S. consul-general in Barcelona reported on in 1916.

Exports even recovered for a time. The 1914 harvest was the largest recorded since 1898, large enough to export more than 50 million pounds, and in 1915 the island exported 23.2 million kilograms (about 51 million pounds). After that, exports declined unevenly: 14.5 million kilograms in 1916, 17.1 million in 1918, 12.7 million in 1919 and 10.6 million in 1922, according to the official Register of Porto Rico for 1926.

The Jíbaro as a Symbol

The jíbaro, the small farmer of Puerto Rico's mountains, has long served as a symbol of Puerto Rican identity. The pava, the straw hat worn by coffee pickers, cane cutters and other farm workers, became an emblem of the jíbaro and of rural Puerto Rican culture. When the Partido Popular Democrático was founded in 1938, it adopted as its emblem the silhouette of a jíbaro in a pava, above the words "Pan, Tierra, Libertad".

Tradition: in popular memory, mountain families are remembered as the keepers of coffee through the lean decades, passing their trees and their knowledge from one generation to the next. This is tradition rather than a measured finding. The farm census supports part of it: in 1949, 24,657 farms still grew coffee.

Hurricane San Felipe Segundo, 1928

On 13 September 1928, Hurricane San Felipe Segundo crossed Puerto Rico. NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory describes it as a Category 5 storm in today's terms, with winds estimated at 200 mph, and as one of only two hurricanes of that strength known to have hit the island. It killed 312 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes. The laboratory states that the island's coffee industry received a blow from which it never recovered. The storm was named for the feast day of Saint Philip, the same day on which an earlier hurricane had struck in 1876.

Another hurricane struck in 1932. The federal reconstruction agency later wrote that the hurricanes of 1928 and 1932 had ruined the island's fruit and coffee farms.

The Depression and the New Deal

Markets for Puerto Rican coffee shrank further in the 1930s. The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) was created by executive order on 28 May 1935. Its own report of December 1938, in which the agency describes its own work, gives these figures for coffee:

In 1936 and 1937 it helped 1,668 coffee farm-owners, supplying labourers to clear their farms, along with fertilisers, insecticides and fungicides.
In Lares and Adjuntas it bought 1,645 acres and settled 200 small farmers, with coffee as their main crop.
By the end of 1938 it had spent $3,951,258.38 on wages for labourers in its coffee, tobacco and fruit projects.

The same report noted, in late 1938, a decline in profitable markets for Puerto Rican tobacco and coffee.

Coffee drying in the hills of Puerto Rico, 1938

Coffee drying in the hills of Puerto Rico, January 1938. Photo: Edwin Rosskam, U.S. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsa-8b30698. No known restrictions.

The 1940s: Coffee Still on the Farm

Coffee was smaller than in the 1890s, but it was far from gone. The U.S. Census of Agriculture counted 24,657 farms growing coffee in Puerto Rico in 1949, on 176,386 cuerdas. They harvested about 25.7 million pounds and sold about 22.6 million. That harvest was well under half of the nearly 59 million pounds exported from the 1896 crop, although the two figures measure different things: a harvest in one case, exports in the other.

Coffee labourers' houses near Lajas, Puerto Rico, 1942

Houses for coffee labourers near Lajas, Puerto Rico, January 1942 (the Library of Congress catalogue title reads "Coffee laborers' company houses"). Photo: Jack Delano, U.S. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, LC-USF34-047911-D. No known restrictions.

Operation Bootstrap and Migration

In May 1947 Puerto Rico passed its first Industrial Incentives Act, which removed the Puerto Rican corporate tax in order to attract manufacturing. The development programme that followed, known as Operation Bootstrap, shifted employment from agriculture to manufacturing and moved rural people into the towns.

Large-scale migration to the U.S. mainland came after 1945, not before. In the 1930s about 1,800 people a year left for the United States. A United Nations conference paper of 1954 noted that net out-migration had become significant only since 1945. This post-war movement is sometimes called the Great Migration.

After 1950

The story continues in Puerto Rico Coffee Renaissance (1950-Present). Puerto Rican coffee's best-documented link to the Vatican also belongs to the years after this period, in the 1950s and 1960s; see the article on Puerto Rican coffee and the Vatican.

Watch: El Motor: Coffee and the Heart of Puerto Rico — Library of Congress

It was made by Russell Oliver, who received a 2022 Community Collections Grant from the American Folklife Center.

Key Facts

Treaty of Paris: signed 10 December 1898
Main coffee markets, 1895: Cuba 35.6% and Spain 24.2% of coffee exports
U.S. duty on coffee: abolished 1 July 1872
Foraker Act: approved 12 April 1900, in force 1 May 1900; five-cent duty on coffee imported into Puerto Rico
Coffee exports, 1901: about 12.2 million pounds, roughly a fifth of 1896
Coffee's rank among exports: second, behind sugar, until the First World War
Hurricane San Felipe Segundo: 13 September 1928; 312 deaths
PRRA: created 28 May 1935; aided 1,668 coffee farm-owners in 1936–37 (agency's own report)
Coffee farms, 1949: 24,657, harvesting about 25.7 million pounds
First Industrial Incentives Act: May 1947

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why did Puerto Rican coffee decline after 1898? Several causes worked together. Spain and Cuba began charging duty on it; the United States, which charged no general duty on coffee, offered no protected market; Hurricane San Ciriaco hit the 1899 harvests; and South American coffee competed for the same buyers. Historians weigh these causes differently; Lugo Amador stresses the tariff changes.

Q: Did the Jones Act ruin Puerto Rican coffee? This encyclopedia found no source showing that. U.S. coastwise shipping law applied to Puerto Rico from 1900, and in this period most of the island's coffee was sold to foreign buyers rather than shipped to the mainland.

Q: When did sugar overtake coffee? Within a few years of 1898. Coffee remained the second export until the First World War.

Q: Had coffee disappeared by 1950? No. In 1949, 24,657 farms grew coffee and harvested about 25.7 million pounds.

Q: What did the 1928 hurricane do to coffee? NOAA's hurricane laboratory states that the coffee industry received a blow from which it never recovered. The federal reconstruction agency later wrote that the hurricanes of 1928 and 1932 ruined the island's coffee farms.

Sources

Foraker Act. Act of 12 April 1900, ch. 191, 31 Stat. 77, sections 1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 38 and 41. Supports: the date of the Treaty of Paris; the five-cent duty on coffee imported into Puerto Rico; the 15% duties and their end; coastwise shipping law; the peso at 60 cents; the date of Hurricane San Ciriaco; the dates of the Act.
Lugo Amador, Luis Alberto. "Amargo negocio: el café puertorriqueño y su comercialización (1898–1918)." Op. Cit. (Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras), no. 16 (2005), pp. 253–285. Supports: the values of coffee and sugar exports in 1898; export volumes for 1896, 1901 and 1914–1922 (the later figures citing the Register of Porto Rico for 1926); market shares in Cuba and Spain; Spanish, Cuban and French duties; the 1908 request for a U.S. duty and its refusal; shipments to the mainland in 1905–06; the prices of the Yauco and caracolillo grades; the failed coffee loans; sugar's rise; coffee as second export until the First World War; the Barcelona fraud; the historians' explanations and the author's own argument.
U.S. Department of State. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1873, Part 1, Vol. 1, Document 39 (U.S. legation at Rio de Janeiro). Supports: abolition of the U.S. duty on coffee on 1 July 1872.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Puerto Rico: Characteristics of the Island's Maritime Trade and Potential Effects of Modifying the Jones Act, GAO-13-260, March 2013. Supports: Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 and its requirements.
Senado de Puerto Rico. R. del S. 19 (2021). Supports: the distinction between the Jones Act of 1917 and that of 1920; coastwise law applied to Puerto Rico by the Foraker Act.
Griffin-Elliott, Thia. "90th Anniversary of Lake Okeechobee Hurricane." NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, 18 September 2018. Supports: the date, strength, deaths and coffee damage of Hurricane San Felipe Segundo.
Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, Information Research Section. Facts About the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration. Mimeographed report, December 1938; transcription published at puertadetierra.info. Programme reporting by the agency itself. Supports: the agency's creation date; the 1928 and 1932 hurricanes; its coffee aid figures; the decline of coffee markets in 1938.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1959 Census of Agriculture: Puerto Rico, Chapter B, Table 19 (figures for 1959 and 1949). Supports: coffee farms, area, harvest and sales in 1949.
Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Object record "Pava", 1997.0097.1036.002. Supports: the pava as an emblem of the jíbaro and its adoption by the Partido Popular Democrático in 1938.
City University of New York. Online exhibit, "Politics" page (nyexhibit.commons.gc.cuny.edu). Supports: the 1938 jíbaro silhouette and the words "Pan, Tierra, Libertad".
Ruiz Toro, Juan. "Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap." Modern Latin America, Brown University Library. Supports: the first Industrial Incentives Act, May 1947, and the removal of the corporate tax.
Lehman College (CUNY). "Puerto Rican Emigration: Why the 1950s?" Supports: U.S. citizenship in 1917; the 1930s migration rate; large-scale migration after 1945; the shift of employment under Operation Bootstrap.
United Nations, World Population Conference (Rome, 1954). "Puerto Rican Migration: Organized and Spontaneous", E/CONF.13/249. Supports: significant net out-migration only since 1945.
Román, Iván. "Why Puerto Rican Migration to the US Boomed After 1945." History.com. Supports: the name "Great Migration" for the post-war movement.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information collection. The photographs on this page, credited in their captions.

Claims this encyclopedia could not source

The following statements appear in published material about this period. This encyclopedia could not trace them to a reliable source:

That coffee exports had fallen about 60% by 1905 and more than 80% by 1930, and that coffee was under 5% of exports by 1950. The sources above show exports at about a fifth of the 1896 level in 1901, a partial recovery up to 1915, and a decline after that.
That by 1930 sugar made up over 60% of export value and coffee under 10%. Figures for these shares differ between secondary sources, and this encyclopedia has not located the official table.
That shipping costs under the Jones Act made Puerto Rican coffee uncompetitive.
That the Second World War briefly revived Puerto Rican coffee through military and government purchasing.
That coffee cooperatives emerged in the 1930s.
That U.S. consumers rejected Puerto Rican coffee because they preferred lighter, cheaper Brazilian and Colombian coffee.

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