Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.13.1.0153
• Pages: 153-155
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Jorge I. Domínguez

booK reVIeWS 153

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in

Cuba (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) pb 249 pp.

ISBN 9781469651422.

Reviewed by Jorge I. Domínguez

Jorge I. Domínguez was formerly a professor (1972-2018) at Harvard University.

He has published numerous books and papers on Cuban politics and society.

Website: https://jorgeidominguez.com

In 1926, President Gerardo Machado proclaimed, “Without economic inde-

pendence there can be no true political independence. We, who wish above all to

preserve our political independence, obtained with the sacrifice of so many pre-

cious lives, … must secure our economic independence” (p. 90). In some contrast,

President of the Council of State, Fidel Castro, affirmed in 1977, “We ran tests

on corn, rice, coffee, and other crops, and found we could get $400 a hectare

from them. Sugar brings US $7,000 a hectare. So we will continue to sell sugar

and to buy other things we need on the world market” (p. 179). Those two quo-

tations, in tension with each other, formulate the goals of Cuba’s nationalism and

the structural market logic that made it so difficult to achieve those goals.

A star historian of Cuba lays out, in magnificent and admirably researched

detail, Cuban sugar’s vast generating wealth potential as well as its paralysing

burden on Cuba’s attempts at economic diversification and self-supply. Pérez

focuses on the trade-offs between sugar exports and domestic rice production.

The promotion and defence of the sugar industry and agriculture persistently

seemed to require privileging sugar exports at the cost of other domestic

production.

The book’s introduction marches through Cuban cookbooks and diet across

the centuries to establish the centrality of rice for Cubans. Chapter 1 describes

the spurt in sugar wealth in the 19th century and Cuba’s dependence on food

imports. Chapter 2 sketches the hardships of Cuban rice consumers in the early

20th century, while sugar production and wealth boomed. Chapter 3 character-

ises the sugar economy’s collapse in the late 1920s and 1930s and its rebirth

during World War II, when US exporters came to monopolise the Cuban rice

imports market. Chapter 4 presents the systematic efforts of the Carlos Prío and

Fulgencio Batista presidencies to advance a nationalist economic agenda, pro-

moting rice production. Chapter 5 features the US rice producers’ counteroffen-

sive in the 1950s to curb domestic Cuban rice output through threats to curtail

Cuban sugar exports to the United States. A brief Epilogue reviews matters from

1959 until the 21st century.