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Throughout the 17^th century, St Domingue (Haiti) was the largest producer of sugar in the world (unfortunately no annual data is available in this source); with the Haitian revolution in 1791, however, Haiti became the first independent state in the Caribbean, and its share of the international sugar market all-but disappeared. By the mid-1800s, European investment in Cuba led to it becoming the world leader in the sugar industry; a position it would hold until the 1960s, when it was overtaken by Brazil.

Slavery and the "sugar bowl of the world"

The brief annexation of Cuba by the British in the 1760s saw an influx of investment from European merchants into Cuba's undermanned sugar plantations, who aimed to exploit Cuba's abundant resources and rival the dominance of St Domingue. With this investment and opening of international trade, plantation owners in Cuba began importing slave labor to meet the overwhelming demand; as a result, Cuba became one of the most common destinations for African slaves in the 19^th century. Slavery was eventually abolished in Cuba in 1886, however this did little to disrupt Cuba's sugar output, and migrant workers were imported form Asia (namely, China) to meet labor demands.
From the data, the first major disruption to Cuba's sugar output came in the 1890s, during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898), when it dropped by over 77.5 percent between 1894 and 1895. Production increased significantly in the early 20^th century, due to agricultural mechanization, and output was between four and five million metric tons in the late 1920s; however, the Great Depression then saw Cuba's sugar output drop from 5.2 million tons in 1928 to just 1.9 million tons by 1932. Annual output then grew significantly following the Second World War, exceeding five (sometimes even eight) million tons per year; nonetheless, output fluctuated greatly, with observable changes during milestone years in Cuban history, such as the military coup in the early 1950s, the Cuban Missile Crisis and U.S. trade embargo in 1962, and Castro's (failed) attempt to harvest ten million tons of sugar in 1970 to boost the Cuban economy.