32 kilometers of narrow-gauge electric railway. That’s how much track Milton S. Hershey ordered built in Cuba in 1916 to move sugar from his plantation to the port at Mariel—because a chocolate bar in Pennsylvania depended on a power line across the Caribbean.
Key Takeaways
- The Hershey Electric Railway in Cuba was constructed in 1916 to transport sugar from Hershey’s plantation to the port, ensuring supply for his chocolate factories.
- The railway spanned 32 kilometers, used 1,100-volt direct current, and operated on a 762-mm narrow gauge.
- It was one of the first electric railways in Cuba and incorporated advanced signaling and overhead catenary systems for the time.
- The infrastructure remained in use for decades, though it’s now largely abandoned, with sections still visible near Havana.
- What began as a supply-chain solution became a lasting, if little-known, feat of early 20th-century industrial engineering.
Hershey Was Never Just About Chocolate
Let’s be clear: Milton S. Hershey didn’t build a chocolate company to sell candy. He built an industrial supply chain wrapped in a consumer brand. By 1916, the Hershey Chocolate Co. was already a mass-production machine—automating every stage of chocolate bar assembly, standardizing the Hershey’s Kiss, and scaling output faster than any rival. But automation means nothing if raw materials run dry.
World War I severed European sugar supplies. The U.S. market tightened. And Hershey, whose entire business ran on sweet, consistent sugar flow, faced a bottleneck that could halt the line. His response wasn’t to negotiate better contracts or stockpile inventory. He bought 25,000 acres of sugarcane land in central Cuba and started building a railway.
That’s not diversification. That’s vertical integration with voltage.
The Wire That Moved the Sugar
The Hershey Electric Railway wasn’t a side project. It was the spine of the operation. When Hershey’s Cuban venture launched, the island’s rail infrastructure was spotty, steam-powered, and controlled by competing interests. Relying on it meant delays, rate hikes, and unpredictability. So Hershey did what industrialists of his era did when infrastructure failed them: he built his own.
Engineers laid 32 kilometers of narrow-gauge track from the plantation near Matanzas to the deep-water port at Mariel. They installed overhead catenary wires carrying 1,100 volts DC—a high voltage for the time, especially in rural Cuba. Trains ran on 762-mm gauge rails, compatible with U.S. mining and plantation lines, not Cuba’s standard 1,435 mm network.
Substations converted power for distribution. Signals controlled junctions. Workers maintained wooden trestles and steel spans under tropical sun. It was a closed-loop system: cane harvested, crushed, boiled into raw sugar, loaded onto electric cars, shipped north—all under one corporate umbrella.
More Than a Supply Line
The railway didn’t just move freight. It powered an entire company town. Hershey built housing, schools, a hospital, and a power plant near the tracks. The system electrified the settlement—lighting homes, running machinery, and even powering streetcars for workers. For a brief period, this stretch of Cuba wasn’t just owned by an American corporation. It was wired by one.
It’s ironic. Today, tech CEOs talk about “building the future” while lobbying for tax breaks. A century ago, Hershey just did it—granted, with the unchecked power of early U.S. economic imperialism in Latin America. But the scale of execution stands out. He didn’t wait for infrastructure to catch up. He installed it—conduit, transformers, rolling stock, and all.
Engineering That Outlasted the Empire
The Cuban government nationalized Hershey’s assets in 1960 after the revolution. The plantation changed hands. The town was renamed. But the railway’s physical imprint remained. Decades later, satellite imagery and on-the-ground reports confirm that significant portions of the route still exist—sleepers in the dirt, rusted rails, crumbling substations.
Parts of the right-of-way have been absorbed into Cuba’s state-run rail network. Others lie in jungle overgrowth. But the alignment is traceable. The engineering was that durable.
- Original length: 32 kilometers
- Voltage: 1,100 V DC
- Gauge: 762 mm (narrow gauge)
- Primary use: Sugar transport from plantation to port
- Legacy: Infrastructure remained in use into the late 20th century
Why This Isn’t Just a History Footnote
You might think this is a curiosity—a chocolate magnate’s colonial-era side hustle. But pull back. This was a fully integrated, privately owned, electric industrial network built in 1916. That’s years before most U.S. rural electrification. Decades before container shipping. At a time when most factories still used line shafts and leather belts for power transmission.
Hershey didn’t just anticipate modern supply chain logistics. He prefigured the idea of the corporate-owned utility. Today, Amazon builds fiber networks for its warehouses. Google powers data centers with private energy grids. Tesla runs its own charging infrastructure. But Hershey did it with rails and copper wire in a country where the national grid barely existed.
And he did it not for data or cloud services—but for something basic, essential: raw material flow. That’s the throughline. When your product depends on a physical input, and the system for delivering it is unreliable, you either adapt or die. Hershey chose to build.
The Irony of Sweet Success
Here’s what hits hardest: Hershey’s railway worked too well. It kept chocolate bars flowing through war, embargo, and political upheaval. Yet almost no one knows it existed. The company’s official history focuses on Milton’s philanthropy, the founding of Hershey, Pennsylvania, and the Kiss wrapper’s distinctive plume. The Cuban chapter? Buried.
But the rails don’t lie. They’re still there—silent, decaying, but legible. They’re a reminder that behind every mass-market product is a hidden web of extraction, energy, and transport. We don’t see it because it’s offshore, out of sight, or out of date. But it’s what makes the machine run.
And let’s call it what it was: a corporate utility masked as logistics. Modern tech firms wrap similar projects in sustainability language or AI-driven efficiency. Hershey just called it “getting sugar to the port.”
What This Means For You
If you’re building digital infrastructure today, Hershey’s railway is a lesson in ownership. Cloud providers, CDNs, and third-party APIs are convenient—until they’re not. When AWS goes down, your app fails. When a vendor changes pricing or sunsets a service, you scramble. Hershey’s solution wouldn’t fly today ethically or politically—but the principle stands: control your critical path.
That doesn’t mean every startup should buy a power plant. But it does mean questioning dependencies. If your product relies on a single supplier, a fragile API, or a platform you don’t control, you’re one outage or policy change away from collapse. Hershey saw risk not as market volatility but as missing infrastructure. So he built it. We rarely do.
What happens when the next supply shock hits—not of sugar, but of chips, bandwidth, or energy? Will you wait for the system to save you? Or will you start laying track?
Sources: IEEE Spectrum, original report
