The nineteenth century was a critical period in the evolution of Puerto Rican society, as the following citation from Fernández Méndez eloquently indicates: The century of Salvador Brau [the noted Puerto Rican social historian] is the century of the forging on Puerto Rican soil of a native bourgeoisie of planters – padres de agrego or señores de ingenio— born in a movement of cultural transformation which converted the preponderant subsistence economy of the eighteenth century into an active agrarian capitalism of sugar and coffee plantations. This system of plantations in the realm of the Spanish Antilles was in its epoch the revolutionary equivalent of the manufacturing system which transformed life in European society in innumerable ways during the nineteenth century.1