The Cuban-American Sugar Company was incorporated in 1906, as a holding company, to acquire the entire capital stock of five independent companies then engaged in the cultivation of sugar cane and the manufacture of raw and refined sugar in the Island of Cuba. Other properties were acquired in 1908, and again in 1910, including a refinery located at Gramercy, Louisiana. On September 30, 1918, the Company owned 504,391 acres of land, of which 157,000 acres or 31 per cent were planted with cane. It also leased 16,713 acres of land, of which 7,825 acres or 47 per cent were under cultivation. Thus there was a total of owned and leased lands of 521,104 acres, of which 164,825 acres or 32 per cent were producing cane. The Cuban-American Sugar Company was for years the largest sugar producing enterprise in the world, until the organization of the Cuba Cane Sugar Corporation, which alone out-ranks it. It has grown out of the Chaparra Sugar Company, now one of its subsidiary companies; which was organized shortly after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War by State Senator Robert B. Hawley, of Galveston, Texas, who at the very beginning employed as his confidential representative and manager of the Chaparra property General Mario G. Menocal, now President of the Cuban Republic but still regarded as the actual General Manager of the Cuban-American Company’s properties in Cuba. The capabilities, enterprise and industry of these two men, and the warm personal as well as cordial business relations established and maintained between them, made it not only possible but easy for each to supplement and co-operate with the other; and to those conditions the great success of the Cuban-American Sugar Company is attributed. While it is true that this Company, like all others, has profited greatly by the high prices resulting from the War, it is also true that the foundations of the success that has been attained by it were laid by the courageous enterprise and perfected by the untiring industry of Mr. Hawley, made effective in Cuba by the energetic and loyal co-operation of General Menocal and his large following of patriotic Cuban compadres, without whose assistance no sugar producing enterprise in Cuba has ever been or will ever be a complete success. Indeed it is largely because of the wise recognition of and sympathetic relations established with the Cuban people by Mr. Hawley that the securities of the Cuban-American Sugar Company are quoted in the markets of the world at higher figures than those of any other sugar producing enterprise.