How Corporate Monoculture Built Slave Empires in Sugar and Henequen | Backyard Empire

After the United States took the Caribbean stage in 1898, American capital turned whole societies into single-crop suppliers. This episode of Backyard Empire follows monoculture as a system of control: Cuba's sugar latifundia and the tiempo muerto 'dead season' of hunger (and the Platt Amendment behind it); absentee American sugar estates in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic; and Mexico's Yucatan, where the henequen 'green gold' boom ran on a secret 1902 pact between International Harvester and the Molina export house, and on the debt peonage of Maya laborers and deported Yaqui prisoners — the system John Kenneth Turner exposed in Barbarous Mexico. The capital here is overwhelmingly American. We keep the disputed numbers contested and the human cost at the center. Part one of a two-part set; the companion covers Hawaii. ▶ Full series:    • Backyard Empire: The United States in Lati...   🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@LetsRethinkH... Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research. #History #Cuba #Mexico