Oh, for the old Cadillac days

“THIS fertile, cultured and potentially profitable island of Negros, whose excellent condition in all ways surpasses the other islands day by day, will be without doubt the scene of great enterprises.” So prophesied Jose Genova, a Spanish writer and traveller, in 1896, in recognition of the emerging sugar industry that promised to make Negros far richer than the other islands in the Philippine archipelago. In one sense, his words were prophetic. For decades, Negros's ruling hacen dero class, the sugar barons, lived sweetly off the proceeds of the island's main crop.