Rice in the Time of Sugar

“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

“Pérez 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. Pérez, 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

“Pérez emphasizes early on the importance of rice to Cuban meals and diets, and its centrality to Cuban food culture. . . . Pérez burrows inside the politics of rice in both Cuba and the United States. At the heart of the book lies the fact that both Cuba and Louisiana could grow both sugar and rice. . . . The underlying research effort is one of the book’s strengths. . . . [A] strong book, in my judgment.”—Hispanic American Historical Review

“Addressing a new counterpoint in Cuban history, Pérez’s magisterial work focuses on the innovative topic of rice, the main staple food in the Cuban diet, and sugar, the omnipresent cash crop. Pérez connects the economic, political, and cultural implications of both crops, including production, trade, and consumption, to Cuba’s socioeconomic evolution. In light of the long history of relations between the island and the United States, this book challenges the idea that the passage of time has overcome some of the deepest problems in the Cuban economy and politics. But it also may serve as a lesson for a better future shared between the two nations.”—Reinaldo Funes Monzote, professor of history, University of Havana, and Henry Hart Rice Family Foundation Visiting Professor, Yale University

“In this cogent and accessible study of the political economy of food in Cuba, Pérez makes perfectly clear the challenges of a country’s economic dependence on one crop, as well as the larger social, political, and international implications of that dependence.”—Robert Whitney, University of New Brunswick