For the first planting, men with heavy sharp pointed “jique” sticks, about five feet in length, travel on parallel lines across the fields, jabbing these stakes into the ground at intervals of four or five feet. Behind them follow others, bearing sacks of cane cut into short pieces, containing one or two joints each, a piece of which is thrust into each hole, and the earth pressed over it with the bare foot. From the eyes of these sections of cane in the rich, moist earth there quickly rise shoots or sprouts of cane, and under the influence of the heavy tropical rains that fall during the summer months the growth is so rapid that the young cane shades the ground before weeds have time to grow. According to the usual custom of the country, the stumps of trees are left to rot and enrich the soil. Thus in the course of a few years a plantation is started at comparatively small cost, from which cane may be cut without replanting for many years to come. Where sugar plantations are developed upon “savana” lands, the rows may be laid out with greater regularity and cultivated with modern machinery and implements until the cane has secured sufficient growth. At the expiration of eighteen months from the first planting, the cane should be ready for the mill. Cutters, with heavy machetes, go into the fields, seize the stalks of cane with the left hand, and with one deft blow of the machete cut them close to the ground. With three or four more strokes the canes are stripped of their leaves, topped, cut in halves and thrown into piles, ready to be loaded upon carts and carried to the mills or railroad stations. During recent years hand labor in the fields has been difficult to secure in Cuba, and since the beginning of the European War the wages of cane cutters have risen from the usual average of $1.25 to $2.50 and even as high as $3.00 a day. Cuba has never had a sufficient amount of resident labor to handle her enormous crops of sugar. Thousands of men are brought to the Island annually, from Spain, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Venezuela, Panama and the West India Islands. Most of these laborers return to their homes at the end of the season, as they can live there in comfort upon the money earned until the next cane-cutting season. A machine for cutting cane, to do the work of forty men, has been invented and in 1918 received practical trial, which is said to have been fairly satisfactory. It is possible that this and other labor saving machinery will soon be perfected so that the large number of field hands now required may thus be replaced, to some extent, and the cost of cane culture and cutting correspondingly reduced.