When Louis Pérez's recent book fell through my letterbox, I could not help but think about the time I lived in Cuban student halls. Short of options, I was referred to the university canteen for food. Invariably, rice and beans were on the menu. Sometimes with chicken; often with a hard-boiled egg. I always looked forward to Fridays when we would have arroz congrí – rice with beans, that is, as opposed to rice and beans. After a month or so, I submitted that it would be nice to have a change. But the Cubans among us shook their heads, not at the prospect of eating outside the comedor, but of eating anything but rice: ‘it would hardly be dinner then, eh?’
Rice in the Time of Sugar is one of those books that allow us to see what we have been looking at all along. Cuba is the country of sugar, but that sugar has been planted, cut and milled by a population eating rice. As one guide to Cuban cuisine has it, ‘It is said that rice goes with everything, and indeed it does’ (p. 14). Granted the importance of rice to the Cuban diet, Pérez sets out to uncover why Cuba relies almost entirely on imports for it. The result is a close study of property relations, trade quotas, tariffs, taxes and, above all, a complicated history of US–Cuban relations in which the allure of sugar profits has trumped everything else.
Pérez weaves a wide array of sources into a colourful collage to narrate a history of economic boom and bust. It is a history in which Cuba is caught in the throes of a (neo-)colonial political economy, but also in which there are repeated, if always ill-fated, attempts to diversify the sugar economy. The first chapter opens with the Haitian Revolution after which sugar capital poured into Cuba. The profits from sugar were so great it was cheaper to import rice from the United States than to allocate slave labour for its production on the island. When the United States raised the tariff on sugar imports in 1894, Spain responded with duties on US imports, and the Cuban economy collapsed. This was the context in which the War of Independence unfolded. After the war, US capital rushed into the island economy, and Pérez argues that the return to sugar monoculture above all occurred by ‘administrative fiat’ (p. 65). To the United States, Cuba exported sugar, period. The feverish recovery of the export economy resulted in the ‘dance of the millions’, but Pérez reveals a counterpoint: rice imports from the United States increased from 4 per cent of the total supply in 1914 to almost 70 per cent in 1920. The consequences were dire. When the sugar market collapsed (again) after the First World War, the Cubans were unable to finance rice imports and the working population suffered from hunger.
The late 1920s is a turning point in the book when the political climate changed in Cuba. The Machado government attempted to diversify the economy in a push for national self-determination. With the Customs-Tariff Law of 1927, duties on raw materials were reduced to boost domestic production and, with investments in road infrastructure, Machado sought to enable internal transports of a more diverse range of goods. The rail and road networks had of course been built to bring sugar to the ports (and, Pérez reminds us, rice to the sugar centrales). Cuban rice increasingly displaced US imports, but Cuba's producers acted in circumstances beyond their control. When US Ambassador Welles brokered an agreement to end Machado's rule, Pérez shows how US rice interests in large part influenced his actions. Without the Cuban market, US rice production was collapsing under its own weight from overproduction. Fifteen months prior to the agreement, US food exports to Cuba amounted to US$33 million; fifteen months after it, they totalled US$71 million.
In the final chapters, Pérez examines another boom-and-bust cycle with far-reaching political consequences. The Cuban sugar industry had stagnated in the 1950s and calls for diversification abounded. The Prío government had early policy successes when rice production increased, and even after Batista had toppled Prío, the commitment to diversification continued: ‘Rice had captured the Cuban imagination and became something of a cause’, Pérez argues (p. 122). One of the most important social implications of domestic rice farming was that the harvest provided work during the sugar low season, the tiempo muerto. In 1955, Cuban rice accounted for almost 60 per cent of national consumption and there was a growing collective optimism that ‘Cuba was on the threshold of a new economic order’ (p. 130). Yet the Cubans remained in the stranglehold of US–Cuban relations. Rice producers in Louisiana and Texas argued that it was unfair for the United States to hold back on sugar production, to the benefit of Cuban producers, without getting access to the rice market in return. They gained the ear of Congress, who used sugar as leverage to pressure Batista. Distressed by the prospects of US tariffs, Cuban sugar interests added internal pressure, and Batista ultimately yielded to the US rice lobby. Rice imports from the United States more than doubled from 1955–8, and while Cuba's rice farmers found themselves unable to compete, support for Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement grew quickly in the core rice-growing regions.
Rice in the Time of Sugar is a rich, empirically driven account of colonial and neo-colonial political economy. It is an excellent introduction to modern Cuban history more widely. However, it also gestures towards themes which deserve more extensive treatment in light of ongoing debates. In the introduction, Pérez embarks on a Bordieuan discussion about the links between cuisine and nationalism. He argues that food gives a visceral quality to national identity, since in choosing to cook and eat specific foods, people negotiate their identity. To prefer US over Valencian rice in the late nineteenth century was a way for Cubans to repudiate Spanish influence. The book lays the groundwork for being an important contribution to the study of food nationalisms, yet the discussion quickly peters out, and Cuban cuisine therefore appears more as a cultural curiosity than a phenomenon developing in relation to a volatile political economy.
Historical scholarship on Cuba has to date almost completely overlooked food production. However, a substantial literature on the political economy of Cuban food and subsistence agriculture exists in agrarian and environmental studies. This literature has emerged in response to the organic and agro-ecological farming practices that became widespread during the Special Period, as well as Cuba's popular movement of urban agriculture. Pérez treats the post-1959 period in the book's epilogue, a period when diversification was initially at the top of the political agenda. The analysis becomes less detailed at this point, and rice could offer a fascinating entry point to understanding the development of Sino-Cuban relations in the 1960s and Cuban priorities following the Sino-Soviet split. Moreover, when the free farmers’ markets closed during the Rectification process, rice largely became unavailable in the non-state sector. This led many Cubans to grow rice themselves, using dryland varieties and small-scale techniques (as opposed to the wetland, industrial techniques long favoured by the state). When the farmers’ markets reopened in 1993 – with rice prices soaring – small-scale ‘cultivo popular’ offered an important economic opportunity.
Rice in the Time of Sugar is an important contribution to our understanding of Caribbean political economy, which upends much-rehearsed narratives of Cuba's economic history. It also adds sorely needed historical depth to the literature on Cuban food production, even though this is a literature with which it could engage more extensively. Sin azúcar no hay país [Without sugar, there is no country], the age-old saying goes, but let there be no doubt: Sin arroz no hay azúcar [Without rice, there is no sugar].
