Cuban Manganese

METALS Cuban Manganese

As the No. 1 world manufacturer of steel, the U. S. is the leading user of a black, coal-like mineral: manganese (Mn to chemists). An essential for the manufacture of steel and certain alloys -- therefore essential for national defense -- manganese is more than 95% an imported material. It comes chiefly from Britain's African Gold Coast, the U. S. S. R. (No. 1 world producer), Cuba, India.

When World War I threatened its manganese supply, the U. S. increased purchases of ore from Cuba and Brazil, began working its own submarginal deposits. In 1918, by exploiting low-grade deposits in Montana and California, the U. S. produced 16.8% of the world supply (35% of its own consumption). Its cost was so high that within a few years after the Armistice domestic production had dribbled almost to the vanishing point. Steelmen wrote off the U. S., along with Cuba, as sources of manganese. Last week it appeared from the annual report of Freeport Sulphur Co. that steelmen may have been premature.

Freeport Sulphur (which reported a net of $2,200,762, up 46.8% from 1938) owns 90% of Cuban-American Manganese Corp. The discoverer of Cuban manganese was a Rough Rider, John Campbell Greenway, later a famed Arizona rancher and copper tycoon who married a schoolmate of Eleanor Roosevelt. Rough Rider Greenway kicked up a lump of ore on a hike over a dusty Cuban road in '98, showed his find to fellow Lieut. David M. Goodrich. Easier to work than U. S. ore because it lies close to the surface, Cuban deposits were far lower grade than the Russian or Indian. Not until 1929 (three years after Greenway had died, four years before his widow became a Congresswoman) did Dave Goodrich, chairman of the board of B. F. Goodrich & Co., reflect again on Cuba's mineral possibilities.

The onetime captain and quarterback of Michigan's famed 1905 point-a-minute team, husky, greying Frederick Stephenson Norcross Jr., a notable mining engineer, saw the possibilities when Goodrich sent him to Cuba to look for minerals. Prospector Norcross reported manganese was the best bet. Dave Goodrich got Freeport to put up $1,620,000 for development and joined Freeport's board. Norcross did the rest.

Diffident Engineer Norcross told the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers last February how he made the Cuban ore commercially workable by devising a special flotation process (grinding the ore, floating off impurities in a soap-and-oil solution, baking what is left).

Cuban-American manganese does not meet the prices of Russia or the Gold Coast but is able to compete because it is free (by the U. S.-Cuban treaty of 1903) of the 2-c- duty on other imports of the metal, has lower shipping costs. Out of orders for the U. S. Government's manganese stock pile (now only 13 days' supply at the 1939 steel production rate) and for the steel industry's private hoard (15 months' supply), Cuban-American after a deficit of $22,059 m 1938, and three deficit quarters in 1939, turned the corner. Result: a 285% increase in gross sales, a record year-end net of $716,865.

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