Planter, statesman, and economic reformer Francisco Arango y Parreño (1765–1837) was the spokesman for Havana's emergent planter elite and was also among the major architects of Cuba's sugar boom during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1792, in the midst of the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue, Arango, Apoderado General of the Havana ayuntamiento, addressed a series of memorials to the Spanish Crown culminating in Discurso sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y Medios de Fomentarla (Arango 1793a:114–75). These documents at once articulated the interests of the Havana planter class and formulated Arango's program for the transformation of Cuban economic life. Widely regarded as key texts of Cuban history, they provided the theoretical framework for the development of Cuba into the world's leading sugar producer from the 1820s into the twentieth century. At the same time, they express the creation of new zones of slave production as part of the political and economic restructuring of the world economy that I have elsewhere called the “second slavery” (Tomich 1988). An examination of these works thus calls attention to the continual re-formation of slavery and other forms of compulsory labor as part of the historical development of the capitalist world economy and to the ways that highly specific local actions at once shape and are shaped by global processes.