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Show times a club, all clustering around a square or park, besides a series of small bungalows which are the employees' and laborers' quarters. About this unit, surrounded by the quietness of sunbaked sugar-cane fields, swarms during the mill-grinding mill-grinding season, generally the first four or five months of the year a colorful and picturesque crowd. Husky cane-cutters brandishing bran-dishing their machetes, come together to-gether with sleepy ox-cart conductors, con-ductors, sweating engineers and white-clad laboratory technicians while somewhere out at the club the pretty daughter of the Administrator Ad-ministrator may be entertaining a visiting sugar-broker. When the zafra, the grinding season, is over the smoke from the giant chimneys chim-neys dies away, the throbbing of the engines stops and the heart of Cuba is still for a while, under the glazed, cloudless blue sky. KNOW you R vTjf NEIGHBOR tiPA II. SUGAR-MILL, HUB OP CUBA'S MAIN INDUSTRY No visitor has smelled the perfume per-fume of Cuba or heard the heart of Cuba beat until he has scented the sweet and heady smell of boiling boil-ing molasses and heard the rumbling rumb-ling of the engines of a sugar-mill. sugar-mill. While everything in Cuba revolves around the sugar-cane industry, a commodity of which the little island is the world's greatest exporter, the hub of sugar sug-ar production is undoubtedly the sugar-mill or central. It is here that the juice of the sugar-cane is actually turned into sugar; here are brought the tall stalks of cane ripened under the tropical sun and from here leave fat bags swollen with the product that may sweeten sweet-en a cup of coffee many thousand miles away. Here, indeed, the destiny des-tiny of Cuba is wrought. A central is really a unit, consisting con-sisting of a huge mill, surrounded by a large area planted to cane. About 13 of the cane is grown by the sugar-mill companies themselves, them-selves, but the traditional method of organizing production is what is known as the colono system, whereby an individual rents a parcel of land from the central company, engages laborers to cultivate cul-tivate the fields and cut the cane, and receives a certain percentage on each 100 pounds of cane he delivers de-livers to the mill.- Sugar-cane is a perennial' of the grass family which grows in tropical regions and reaches a height from five to fourteen feet. The stalk's hard rind , encases the juicy pit which contains up to 20 percent of the sugar. Slender leaves grow off this stalk which is crowned at harvest time by a tassel. Cuban soil is so fertile that cane does not have to be replanted every year but is grown again from the year before's stubble in a process pro-cess that is called "ratoonin-" "Cane is cut close to the ground by machetos, the cutter developing develop-ing an extraordinary skill which enables him to sever the cane, trim off the dry leaves, cut the stalk into suitable1 lengths, and throw the pieces into a nearby pile, all ,in one almost continuous motion. From the pile, the cane is lifted by the cutter to the carts and hauled usually by four o'r six yoke of oxen, to the nearest cane switch of the company's railway, where by means of a crane the load is lifted in a sling, weighed and dropped into a railway car for transportation to the mill." At the mill, after sharp knives have cut the cane, it is fed to rollers roll-ers and shredders which extract the juice. Bagasse the string pulp remaining after the juice has been squeezed out, is used as fuel for the mill, as a feed for cattle and as the starting point for a number of by-products including fibre-board (colotex). As for the raw juice the actual source of sugar it is purified and clarified by being treated with chemicals (lime milk is one of them) and heated. Turned into a syrup in vacuum evaporators, it is then boiled until it. becomes a brown mass of crystals and molasses. "The resultant 'first' sugar is still moist and lumpy. The molasses that remains in the centrifugal machines is combined with additional addi-tional syrup, boiled again, and put through the centrifugals for the extraction of more crystals classed, class-ed, this time, as 'second' sugar. Upon undergoing the process a third time the molasses reaches its maximum point of crystallization crystalliza-tion and the remaining or final molasses is sold for the manufacture manufac-ture of alcohol and rum." The raw sugar is conveyed to a large bin from where it is packed in bags, weighed and shipped out. Besides the mill itself, a central includes a laboratory where sugar sug-ar is analyzed at every stage of its production, and where experiments experi-ments on sugar are made as well as on the waste products of the industry. Furthermore, the batey (name by which is known the little lit-tle community surrounding a sugar-mill) is composed of the Administration Ad-ministration building, the homes of the owner (when there is one) and of the First and Second Administrators, Ad-ministrators, of a church, a store, a "cafe," a schoolhouse, some- |