Bad Bunny knew exactly what he was doing the second that blade hit the cane.

My grandmother used to talk about sugar cane like it was a person she survived. Not worked with. Survived.

She would sit at the table after dinner, hands still rough decades later, and describe mornings that started before sunrise because the heat would become unbearable by mid-day. She told me the leaves sliced skin like paper cuts that never stopped burning once sweat hit them. She talked about the sound. Metal hitting stalk. Over and over. Not rhythm. Not music. Just work.

And the rule was simple. You did not slow down.

When the halftime show opened with dancers chopping cane under stadium lights, it pulled those stories straight out of memory. On the most polished American stage imaginable, the first image was labor. Not glamour. Not spectacle. Labor.

Sugar built the modern Western world. Literally. The wealth that financed European empires, early American banks, insurance companies, railroads and global trade networks flowed from sugar plantations across Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Louisiana and the wider Caribbean. And that wealth was extracted through one of the most brutal systems humans ever created.

Sugar was not like cotton or tobacco. Those crops were hard. Sugar was relentless.

Harvesting cane meant swinging machetes for hours under tropical heat so intense people collapsed in fields. The cuts from the leaves infected easily. Workers lost fingers, hands and sometimes their lives to the mills that crushed cane nonstop during harvest season. People worked in shifts that ran day and night because once cut, the cane had to be processed immediately. There was no rest. There was production or punishment.

Historians call it industrial slavery because it functioned like a factory powered by bodies. And even when slavery was abolished, the conditions still existed across Caribbean countries well into the 1940's.

Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny’s homeland, lived that reality for centuries. First under Spain, then under American corporate control after 1898, when U.S. sugar companies took over huge portions of the island’s land and economy. Entire towns revolved around centrales, the mills. Generations of Puerto Ricans cut cane for companies whose profits left the island while the labor stayed behind in their bones.

So when the show began with machetes slicing cane, it was not just aesthetic. It was placement. He put Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean inside the foundation of American prosperity on a night built to celebrate American excess.

Then came the color. The dancers. The flags. The music. Joy did not erase the past. It followed it.

That contrast was the point. Survival became culture. Pain became rhythm. Celebration became proof.

Watching it, I kept thinking about my grandmother describing how the day ended the same way it began. Exhausted, covered in dust, hands throbbing. And how she laughed years later not because it was funny but because she made it out.

The performance did not lecture. It showed.

Millions saw choreography. Some of us saw memory. A Puerto Rican artist used the biggest American platform to say that before the touchdowns, before the ads, before the empire, there was the cane.

And some of the people who cut it are still here.