Now the Indian, despite the fortunes which have been made by the hacendados in the henequen business, has no interest at all in becoming a henequen grower. He knows from experience that the value of the leaves he himself produces are little more than what he would be paid on an hacienda for cutting the hacendado’s own leaves, and he knows that he has not the capital or the initiative to go into hemp production himself. The result was that some years ago, when the communal land was first distributed to the Indians, it was cropped once or twice and then sold to the nearest hacendado to become henequen plots. Sometimes indeed, the communal land was so worthless for corn that the hacendados were allowed to take it over without payment or protest and to plant it to henequen. This loss, from the Indian viewpoint, was far from an unmixed evil, for the natives of the commune profited in the gaining of an opportunity for assured livelihood close by their homes--difficult enough except on the henequen farms, in the desert sections of Yucatan. Henequen production is far more of an industry than it is a farming project. Primarily, it requires from the planting of the shoots until the first leaves are ready for cutting, eight years of continual and expensive care, for the fields must be kept clear of brush and weeds, the plants tended and those which die replaced with regularity. After eight years of continuous outlay, the leaves are cut, brought into a great industrial plant where machinery and many workers are required to remove the pulp, to dry the hemp fiber on racks under the sun, to pack it into 400-pound bales in hydraulic presses, and to ship it to the distant American market. The agricultural end of the henequen business is but a small item in its process, and no individual farmer, even if he has moderate capital, can prosper on it. The land distribution planned by Alvarado was to be made from the great henequen haciendas, and some of the oratory defending the confiscation of those haciendas pointed out the fact that this very land had been stolen from the Indian communes in years gone by and was now being returned to the original Indian owners. That was interesting to the pitying audiences of the Alvarado propagandists in the United States, but it was of not the slightest interest to the Indians of Yucatan. They had once owned that land, and had or had not cropped it in corn once or twice. They knew quite well it was hardly worth the trouble and the expense in taxes it would be for them to own it again, especially as they saw the hacendados being skillfully put out of business and knew that with their disappearance went the only market in which Indians could sell the land after they got it, or the henequen leaves if they raised them.