When U.S. president Barack Obama set out to Cuba in the summer of 2016, one key ally in his push to normalize relations was U.S. secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack. Vilsack had already led a trade delegation to the country months earlier. With the backing of a large bloc of U.S. agricultural companies, the secretary drew up new accords that loosened financial restrictions, created avenues for collaborative research, and facilitated greater access to Cuban markets for U.S. goods and services. While language of sustainability and humanitarian interests colored Department of Agriculture press releases, Vilsack and representatives of agricultural companies emphasized again and again the poor market share that U.S. agricultural products claimed in Cuba. The seeming illogic of far more distant countries like Vietnam supplying the majority of Cuba's rice imports clearly stuck in everyone's craw.

Louis A. Pérez Jr.’s new history of agricultural production and consumption in Cuba historicizes those complaints and makes clear that presumed access to the island's cookpots has long shaped U.S.-Cuban relations. At the same time, Rice in the Time of Sugar is both a loving ode to Cuban culinary traditions and a clarion call to historians of Latin American agriculture and trade. Yes, Pérez insists, sugar and tobacco and coffee matter, but the frutos menores, or nonexport subsistence crops, that actually feed people deserve far more scholarly attention than they have received. Through the lens of rice, Pérez provides a history of how the Cuban government and the Cuban people struggled to manage U.S. market interventions for both exports and imports in order to access necessary foodstuffs.

Pérez is quite right that Latin American agricultural history has generally focused on how the region filled the market baskets and dinner tables of other places. Sugar dominates histories of the Caribbean and, along with coffee, bananas, henequen, beef, drugs, and myriad other export crops, fills bookshelf upon bookshelf dedicated to Latin America. Subsistence, when addressed, is usually written as a secondary story of increased scarcity and rising discontent from displaced villagers and small farmers. Here, Pérez flips that model. Calling back to Fernando Ortíz's classic Cuban Counterpoint (1940), 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.

The book opens with an introduction that celebrates the emergence of a recognizably Cuban cuisine in the early nineteenth century, with rice in all its manifestations as a central element. The following chapters move quickly across the last two centuries to narrate how the promise and pressures of export markets facilitated the contraction of rice production in favor of sugar's expansion. Combining literary and artistic source material with economic data, newspaper pieces, and government policy, Pérez paints a nuanced portrait of the multitude of actors and ideas at play in this transformation. Grappling with regimes from Spanish colonial to American invasionary to Cuban revolutionary, Pérez never makes rice's sacrifice to sugar seem either inevitable or inexorable. While his arguments about the overarching interests of various actors could have been more pointed, and the latter half of the book settles into a predictable seesaw between U.S. rice growers and Cuban consumers, Pérez nonetheless clarifies the variety of positions taken by producers and consumers in Cuba and abroad with regard to who should be growing what and for whom.

It is particularly refreshing to read an account of the embrace of export agriculture that illuminates Cuban planters’ and the Spanish and then Cuban governments’ rationale for turning away from primary goods like rice. This was not simply a story of greedy foreigners extracting all they could. Instead, reasonable evaluations of potential profit per hectare and clear-eyed engagement with economic ideas and markets of the time drove both nineteenth- and twentieth-century actors to favor increased export production. At the same time, Pérez provides extensive evidence of all those who recognized the potential dangers of this turn. Discussions of food sovereignty are nothing new. Whether in newly independent Cuba, during the Great Depression, or under Fidel Castro, the nation's inability to feed itself regularly registered both in the press and in policy decisions. U.S. policymakers also pointed out the dangers of monoculture and, like their Cuban counterparts, debated with commercial producers over the political and economic benefits of entrenching the exchange of Cuban sugar for U.S. foodstuffs.

Pérez hands large swaths of his text over to the historical actors making these arguments and grappling with their outcomes, whether in white papers, editorials, or novels. At times, the text seems to contain as many words by other authors as by Pérez. The clarity of his argument about political economy and the causal factors behind shifting policy in both Cuba and the United States sometimes suffers as a result. Yet the richness and variety of this source material also serves to undergird Pérez's emphatic insistence that primary goods like rice deserve our attention. Rice in the Time of Sugar is a valuable intervention for scholars looking to understand the intersections between consumption and production and a call to us all to pay attention to how people managed to eat.