Importance of Sugar

United Fruit Company’s business is built on sugar cane, and sugar comes to symbolize the external saccharine joy of the American’s exploitation of Oriente, “the world’s sugar bowl” (45). K.C. at first reminisces fondly of “the smell of boiling cane syrup—the meladura, it’s called—used to fill the air in Preston. A warm, malty smell. I loved that smell. I can smell it right now” (13). Yet as the novel progresses, he begins to explore the incredible human cost that goes into the production of sugar through the ages, from the “tin face masks” that enslaved cane cutters were forced to wear in the 19th century to prevent them from eating the sugar cane, to his own father’s companies practice of paying wages only at the end of the harvest.