Overview

In this history of Cuba, Louis A. Perez proposes a new Cuban counterpoint: rice, a staple central to the island's cuisine, and sugar, which dominated an export economy 150 years in the making. Perez shows how the logic of the sugar trade resulted in the development of an agriculture for consumers abroad at the expense of consumers at home. In the process, dependency on food imports, a signal feature of the Cuban economy, was set in place. Efforts to diversify the economy through expanded rice production were met with keen resistance by U.S. rice producers, who were as reliant on the Cuban market as Cubans were on the U.S. market. U.S. growers prepared to retaliate by cutting the sugar quota in a struggle to control Cuban rice markets. Perez's chronicle culminates in the 1950s, a period of deepening revolutionary tensions on the island, as U.S. rice producers and their allies in Congress clashed with Cuban producers supported by the government of Fulgencio Batista. U.S. interests prevailed—a success, Perez argues, that contributed to undermining Batista's capacity to govern. Cuba's inability to develop self-sufficiency in rice production persists long after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. Cuba continues to import rice, but, in the face of the U.S. embargo, mainly from Asia. U.S. rice growers wait impatiently to recover the Cuban market.

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9781469651422

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As a much-needed addition to the vast literature on Cuban sugar and tobacco, this book skillfully delineates the devastation export-driven monoculture caused for small producers, domestic markets, sovereignty, and ordinary Cubans' everyday struggles with food scarcity under both capitalism and socialism.--Choice Perez emphasizes that it is producers of rice, plantains, and vegetables, rather than farmers growing other exports like tobacco, who ought to serve as the melody against which the literature's overrepresented sugar planters must harmonize.--Business History Review This book connects the scattered dots about land tenure, bilateral trade agreements, international politics, colonialism, and imperialism into a cogent argument. . . . Researchers keen on the theoretical lens of food as cultural and national markers will find this book a tantalizing treat.--The AAG Review of Books Louis A. Perez, Jr.'s scholarship on Cuban history is prolific and foundational to the field. It is fitting, then, that his latest monograph gives fresh life to older questions of political economy. . . . Rice in the Time of Sugar casts the enduring quandary of Cuban economic dependence into stark relief.--Bulletin of Latin American Research

As a much-needed addition to the vast literature on Cuban sugar and tobacco, this book skillfully delineates the devastation export-driven monoculture caused for small producers, domestic markets, sovereignty, and ordinary Cubans' everyday struggles with food scarcity under both capitalism and socialism.--Choice Perez emphasizes that it is producers of rice, plantains, and vegetables, rather than farmers growing other exports like tobacco, who ought to serve as the melody against which the literature's overrepresented sugar planters must harmonize.--Business History Review

As a much-needed addition to the vast literature on Cuban sugar and tobacco, this book skillfully delineates the devastation export-driven monoculture caused for small producers, domestic markets, sovereignty, and ordinary Cubans' everyday struggles with food scarcity under both capitalism and socialism.--Choice

As a much-needed addition to the vast literature on Cuban sugar and tobacco, this book skillfully delineates the devastation export-driven monoculture caused for small producers, domestic markets, sovereignty, and ordinary Cubans' everyday struggles with food scarcity under both capitalism and socialism.--Choice Perez emphasizes that it is producers of rice, plantains, and vegetables, rather than farmers growing other exports like tobacco, who ought to serve as the melody against which the literature's overrepresented sugar planters must harmonize.--Business History Review This book connects the scattered dots about land tenure, bilateral trade agreements, international politics, colonialism, and imperialism into a cogent argument. . . . Researchers keen on the theoretical lens of food as cultural and national markers will find this book a tantalizing treat.--The AAG Review of Books

Author Information

Louis A. Perez Jr is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the Academia de la Historia de Cuba, Perez is author of numerous books on Cuban history and culture, including On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture and The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past.

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