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

Political Economy of Food in Cuba - Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba. By Louis A. Pérez Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 264. $29.95 paper. - Volume 78 Issue 4

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), pp. xiv + 249, $29.95 pb.

PérezJr., Louis (2019) Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), xiv + 249 pp. $29.95 pbk.

Louis Pérez, author of more than a dozen books on modern Cuba and Cuban-American relations, here turns his hand to the history of Cuban rice. Historians interested in Cuban agriculture have written abundantly and wonderfully on sugar and tobacco. They have shown much less interest in Cuban food and food production. Pérez emphasizes early on the importance of rice to Cuban meals and diets, and its centrality to Cuban food culture. He stresses the irony that while Cubans for two centuries have been great rice eaters, trailing only some Asian populations in per capita rice consumption, they have never been great rice producers. Although Cuban landscapes, especially in the westernmost third of the island, are suited to rice growing, at many points in their history Cubans have imported 90 percent or more of their rice. This mismatch between production and consumption is what Pérez wishes to explain, especially for the years between 1840 and 1960. His stated aim is “to lift rice out of historiographical obscurity, to situate rice at the center of the very way to think about the Cuban past” (p. 23).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. As a result of the growing involvement of the United States in Cuban affairs, the fate of Cuban rice farmers and rice production hinged on tariff deals between the two countries. If the US Congress and Commerce Department were to give Cuban sugar a warm welcome in US markets, then, in exchange, Cuba would have to allow US rice favorable terms. Given that economies of scale were more easily achieved by US rice farmers than their Cuban counterparts, trade deals that suited Cuban sugar producers always handicapped (uncompetitive) Cuban rice farmers. As Pérez puts it, “US rice producers had no better allies than Cuban sugar producers” (p. 25). Many Cubans lamented the lack of homegrown rice, and several governments sought to bolster rice farming, to little effect. Even Fidel Castro, who changed so much, could not change Cuba's dependence on foreign rice.Chapter 1 revisits the rise of sugar and decline of subsistence food production in nineteenth-century Cuba. Rice from South Carolina and Georgia helped make Cuban specialization in sugar feasible. By midcentury, sugar producers dominated Cuban agriculture and those aspects of policy that Spain (Cuba's colonial master before 1898) left to Cubans. Chapter 2 charts the course of rice imports from the 1890s to about 1920, an era when Cubans produced almost no rice of their own. They imported rice from several Asian countries, but the interruptions to maritime shipping brought on by World War I obliged Cubans to rely heavily on US rice for the first time. Chapter 3 explains that Asian rice reclaimed its place in Cuban markets in the 1920s, that Cuban efforts to boost rice production in the late 1920s brought meager results, and that in 1937–38 the US government negotiated new tariffs giving American rice farmers an edge over Asian ones in the Cuban market. The disruptions of World War II encouraged Cubans to try to grow more of their own rice, which they did, tripling output—but still accounting for only 3 percent of Cuban farm acreage. Chapters 4 and 5 detail the politics of rice and sugar in the 1950s. In the early 1950s, against the backdrop of a struggling economy, the Fulgencio Batista government made efforts once again to expand rice production, which had the potential to resolve the summer underemployment that came with the seasonality of sugar growing. But in 1956 Batista reversed course under pressure from sugar interests. An epilogue takes the story through the last 60 years, ending much where matters began, with Cuba importing the bulk of its rice.Pérez did research in at least eight cities. He used official documents, the press, trade publications, travel literature, and much else. The underlying research effort is one of the book's strengths. The audience that Pérez had in mind seems to be fellow scholars. The sources sometimes dominate the story, with long quotations from one or another official. A few quotations appear only in Spanish.The weakest feature in a strong book, in my judgment, is contextualization. Pérez focuses so intently on trade negotiations that he mentions only in passing important constraints and conditions that shape his larger story, such as the idea of comparative advantage and the ideology of free trade or the anxieties of Cold War Washington.

Cuba has imported rice for most of the past 200 years. It did not have to be this way, and Louis A. Perez, Jr. explains why. Using records culled from archives, rice-growing trade association bulle...

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

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

Reviewed by: Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America by Erica Hannickel Peter Catapano EMPIRE OF VINES: Wine Culture in America. By Erica Hannickel. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. 2013. Popular food histories especially those of Mark Kurlansky like Cod (1998) and Salt (2003) have reached a wide-audience of readers by focusing on a single item [End Page 126] to unleash a rich narrative regarding the environment and the political economy of food. However, more recently, as food studies has proliferated as an academic field, so too has the quantity of scholarly publications. Like Kurlansky, Erika Hannickel has contributed a work that traces the history and cultural significance of a single food. However, her work is more in line with academic food histories like David Smith’s Eating History (2009) that trace the intersection of foodways and national identity. Hannickel provides a cultural history of wine that covers American history from the nineteenth century to the present. She emphasizes both the cultivation of the grape as wine and as myth, claiming that the “still-prolific vineyard mythos” continues to be “tangled with the ideology of national expansion and its ideological foundation in manifest destiny” (4–5). Hannickel claims that wine was never perceived as one of life’s essentials to most Americans as it is to the French and Italians. Instead, she claims wine has been bound to a sense of luxury. Americans’ attraction to wine has a strong relationship to a romance of the vineyard as site of a gentle cultivation of the American wilderness. In the early nineteenth century, important horticulturalists like William Robert Prince were instrumental in promoting this mythos. Prince’s nursery in Flushing, New York sold seeds, plants, and vines at first to the Hudson River Valley and later across the country. He advocated for the cultivation of native grapes that would be given American—rather than European—names. Hannickel describes how wine cultivation that began in New York moved west with the country. In her most detailed chapter, she presents the life of the upwardly-mobile Nicholas Longworth, who became a wealthy wine producer and real estate developer in nineteenth-century Cincinnati by cleverly cultivating both the land and the myth. His strategy would be repeated in the twentieth century in Sonoma and Napa Valley by new generations of entrepreneurs. Empire of the Vines might be a disappointment to wine connoisseurs hoping for detailed account of the development of American wine. While Hannickel occasionally describes many varieties of American wines, her interest is in viticulture and demystification, rather than the finished product. Her final chapter warns about the continuing excesses of the vineyard mythos with a reading of contemporary popular representations of wine and its enthusiasts, including an extended analysis of the film Sideways (2004). Erica Hannickel’s survey of manifest destiny, national identity, and the grape should be of interest to American Studies and Food Studies scholars alike. She convincingly argues that Americans came to realize that their Garden of Eden would not be complete without the ancient vine. By the twentieth century, American wines were produced from coast to coast and, as in the present, in nearly every region of the country. [End Page 127] Peter Catapano New York City College of Technology Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Hundreds of millions of people still suffer from chronic hunger and food insecurity despite sufficient levels of global food production. The poor's inability to afford adequate diets remains the biggest constraint to solving hunger, but the dynamics of global food insecurity are complex and demand analysis that extends beyond the traditional domains of economics and agriculture. How do the policies used to promote food security in one country affect nutrition, food access, natural resources, and national security in other countries? How do the priorities and challenges of achieving food security change over time as countries develop economically? The Evolving Sphere of Food Security seeks to answer these two important questions and others by exploring the interconnections of food security to security of many kinds: energy, water, health, climate, the environment, and national security. Through personal stories of research in the field and policy advising at local and global scales, a multidisciplinary group of scholars provide readers with a real-world sense of the opportunities and challenges involved in alleviating food insecurity. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, management of HIV/AIDS, the establishment of an equitable system of land property rights, and investment in solar-powered irrigation play an important role in improving food security---particularly in the face of global climate change. Meanwhile, food price spikes associated with the United States' biofuels policy continue to have spillover effects on the world's rural poor with implications for stability and national security. The Evolving Sphere of Food Security traces four key areas of the food security field: 1) the political economy of food and agriculture; 2) challenges for the poorest billion; 3) agriculture's dependence on resources and the environment; and 4) food in a national and international security context. This book connects these areas in a way that tells an integrated story about human lives, resource use, and the policy process. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/9780199354061/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Eran Bendavid Jennifer Burney Mariano-Florentino Cuellar Jennifer Davis Walter P. Falcon Christopher B. Field Jikun Huang Eric F. Lambin David Lazarus David B. Lobell Pamela A. Matson Rosamond L. Naylor Amy J. Pickering Scott Rozelle Ximena Rueda Whitney L. Smith Stephen John Stedman Johan Swinnen Barton (Buzz) H. Thompson, Jr. Peter A. Vitousek Xiaobing Wang

Previous articleNext article FreeThe ajiaco in Cuba and beyond Preface to "The human factors of cubanidad" by Fernando OrtizJoão Felipe GONÇALVESJoão Felipe GONÇALVESTulane University Search for more articles by this author Tulane UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLatin American anthropology, in its early developments, had a clear nationalist mission. Instead of focusing on faraway cultures and societies, as did their Western European and North American counterparts, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American anthropologists concentrated their efforts on interpreting their own nations. Although the degree to which this happened varied in different countries, Latin American anthropologists played a key role in articulating national(ist) imaginaries, and their ideas have been disseminated through textbooks, rituals, museums, monuments, and popular culture. It is revealing that the discipline obtained its largest and most robust infrastructure precisely in those two countries—Mexico and Brazil—where it has been most influential in the production of nationhood. Although this situation has changed considerably in the last few decades—again, in different degrees across the region—Latin America has long produced what Claudio Lomnitz (2001: 228) has called "national anthropologies," that is, "anthropological traditions that have been fostered by educational and cultural institutions for the development of studies of their own nation."One could thus think that, while Euro-American anthropologies traditionally have been concerned with "the other," Latin American anthropologists have been mostly interested in "the self "—that is, the self of that imagined community that they helped construct. But the recursive character of the distinction between the other and the self is no secret, and much of classic Latin American anthropology has studied those domestic others—the oppressed and marginalized ethnic and racial groups that today we like to call subaltern—that were supposed to best represent the authentic national self. This has earned Latin American anthropologists some criticism, according to which these mostly white middle- or upper-class urban intellectuals contributed to the exoticization and exploitation of the groups they studied (e.g. Golte 1980). This indictment, however, is unfairly one-sided. As public intellectuals, anthropologists in the region have been active participants in the struggle for social justice and for the rights of indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and lower classes. They have been doing this not only in their scholarly texts, but also in the public sphere and in the political arena: in social movements and governmental organizations, in newspapers and television shows, in law courts and constitutional assemblies (see Poole 2008).Throughout the twentieth century, the public mission of Latin American anthropologists has led to a complex relationship between their scholarship and the ideologies of racial and cultural hybridity that have characterized many national imaginations in the region (see de la Cadena 2000; Miller 2004). Such ideologies envision national cultures as the result of racial and cultural admixture between European, African, Amerindian and, to a lesser extent, Asian elements. This process is often referred to by the Spanish term mestizaje, derived from mestizo, whose original meaning refers to a person of mixed race, but is also applied as an adjective to things of mixed cultural background. Since the 1950s, many Latin American anthropologists have simply avoided or harshly criticized such ideologies, denouncing their empirical and political limitations. However, like other intellectuals—historians, pedagogues, journalists, visual artists, novelists, and poets—anthropologists have sometimes participated in the formulation of mestizaje nationalisms. The two most influential cases were those of Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) in Brazil and Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) in Cuba, the founders of modern sociocultural anthropology in those countries.1The text that follows is a translation of one of the most original and sophisticated conceptualizations of mestizaje by a Latin American anthropologist and public intellectual. Fernando Ortiz first delivered "Los factores humanos de la cubanidad" as a lecture at the University of Havana in 1939, and published it in the following year in the journal he edited, Revista Bimestre Cubana. He was given the topic of the talk—"the human factors of Cubanness"—by the fraternity that invited him to speak, which indicates the public interest in an anthropologist's expertise in characterizing national culture. But his very words in the lecture, as well as his larger trajectory, show that defining Cuban culture was for Ortiz himself an existential mission, a life-long project with clear political concerns. The lecture that Hau is now publishing also summarizes Ortiz's view that one could only understand Cuban culture by seeing it as a "mestizaje of races, mestizaje of cultures" and by examining the various cultural elements that composed it. The text is thus a classic example of a Latin American anthropologist participating in the public imagination of nationhood based on a view of mestizaje.This context is critical to understanding "The human factors of cubanidad." But we have not chosen to translate it into English only as a historical example of a style of "peripheral" anthropology. For most non-specialists, the relevance of this text may lie in the extent to which it escapes its original nationalist goals and offers a unique understanding of mestizaje radically different from other views that are better known in the English-speaking world. By using the culinary metaphor of the ajiaco (a typical Cuban stew made of several elements), by defining Cubanness as a process rather than an essence, and by distinguishing between Cuban culture and identity, Ortiz's conceptualization of cultural mixture may shed new light on processes occurring elsewhere, as demonstrated in a recent work by Stephan Palmié (2013). Before explaining this in more detail, I will offer a brief overview of Fernando Ortiz's life and work.It is often observed that many nationalist Latin American intellectuals and artists were educated in Western Europe and the United States and used the knowledge acquired there to interpret their own nations. This typically refers to their higher education, but the case of Fernando Ortiz was more extreme: born in Havana in 1881, he was mainly raised in the Spanish island of Minorca, where his family moved the following year. After a short period in Havana in his adolescence, Ortiz went back to Spain, this time to Madrid and then Barcelona, where he obtained respectively a bachelor's and a doctor's degree in Law. The years of his youth were politically turbulent in Cuba. As a teenager in Havana, Ortiz saw the country's last war of independence, which ended in 1898 with the American intervention in what became known outside the island as the Spanish-American War. After four years of American occupation, Cuba was granted formal independence in 1902. That same year, a recently graduated Ortiz became a diplomat of the new nation, representing it in Spain, France, and Italy.2Fernando Ortiz only settled permanently in Cuba in 1905, at the age of twenty-four. He then launched an extremely productive career as a writer, lawyer, public prosecutor, criminologist, and politician. It was Ortiz's criminological interests that first led him to anthropological research. The racist notions that prevailed in Cuba at that time linked several criminal activities to witchcraft of supposed African origin, and this was the topic of his first book, Los negros brujos, published in 1906. Under the influence of Cesare Lombroso—with whom he had presumably taken classes during his diplomatic stay in Genoa and who wrote the preface to the book—Ortiz attributed crime and witchcraft to biological factors. During the following ten years he wrote several monographs on what he called "Afro-Cuban" topics: folklore, religion, slavery, rebellions, and language. In these books, partly influenced by the work of Oswald Spengler, he gradually abandoned his initial racialist perspective and adopted a more sociological and cultural approach, and by the 1920s he had become an outspoken opponent of Cuban racism.In the first three decades of the century, Ortiz also wrote articles and delivered speeches on Cuban politics, in which he denounced several problems of the early republic and proposed solutions, especially to the economic dependency on sugar and to the endemic corruption that made political office-holding one of the most profitable activities in the country. He also criticized the control the United States exerted over Cuba's economy and politics, and he called for a reform of the terms of Cuba's relations with its northern neighbor. Already a prominent public intellectual and a professor of public law at the University of Havana, Ortiz also engaged in formal politics as a member of the Liberal Party. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1917 and stayed there until he resigned ten years later.The presidency of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933) marked the end of Ortiz's involvement in formal politics. Running on a reformist platform that included the diversification of the Cuban economy and the end of the Platt Amendment (a provision that permitted American intervention in Cuban politics), Machado not only fell short on his promises, but also became a ruthless dictator who violently repressed any opposition and protected American interests in the island. Like most liberal intellectuals, Ortiz had strongly supported Machado at first, but he joined the opposition in 1927. Eventually forced into exile in 1931, he continued to attack Machado from Washington, DC, until the fall of the dictator in 1933. Although he advised the short-lived revolutionary government that was then established, he soon became disillusioned and skeptical about formal politics and from then on dedicated all his efforts to intellectual pursuits.Between 1934 and 1940 Fernando Ortiz published no book-length monographs, but, as fascism grew in Europe, he intensified his attacks on racism in Cuba through public lectures and articles in the press. In this period Ortiz was involved in intense research and in the rethinking of Cuban culture, which in 1940 resulted in the publication of what would become his most influential work: Cuban counterpoint: Tobacco and sugar (the first English translation published in 1947). This book used baroque prose to interpret Cuba's history and culture by comparing the island's two most important agricultural products, considering everything from their physical aspects as plants to the different forms of their consumption and their effects on human bodies. Against an intellectual tradition that, since the late eighteenth century, had linked Cuban pride to the production and export of sugar, Ortiz praised the tobacco industry for having fostered the most progressive—even revolutionary—factors in Cuban politics and for being based traditionally on small properties, national land ownership, and free labor. He contrasted this to the sugar economy, which he depicted as having a lasting conservative effect on the country due to its association with large estates, foreign capital, slavery, and the intense exploitation of labor.1940 was a turning point in Ortiz's career. The two main pieces that he published that year—Cuban counterpoint and "The human factors of cubanidad"—exemplify how his political concerns for Cuba from then on were expressed through anthropological writing rather than in formal political involvement. That year was a turning point for Cuban history as well. It saw the promulgation of a new Constitution, widely celebrated for its social-democratic character and the hopes it brought to different social groups. But the experience with representative democracy that followed was plagued with corruption scandals and political violence, and ended with Fulgencio Batista's coup d'état in 1952. Fernando Ortiz's relative silence about formal politics—except for brief statements in interviews and press articles— remained during Batista's dictatorship (1952–58) and the ten years of Fidel Castro's government that he lived to see.It was clear that Ortiz's political battles had shifted to the field of cultural production, in which he worked ceaselessly during the last three decades of his life. In this period he published several long volumes on Cuban history and Afro-Cuban issues (especially music and dance), besides a book and several articles analyzing and attacking the continued existence of racism in the country. What is more, he left a vast collection of research notes and incomplete manuscripts, which are still being edited and published by the indefatigable staff of the Fundación Fernando Ortiz, Cuba's main institution of anthropological research. Created in 1995 by the writer Miguel Barnet, the Foundation most recently published Ortiz's (2008) manuscript about the cult of Cuba's patron saint, remarkably edited by José Matos Arévalos. I was in Havana at the time of the release of this book, which was widely publicized in mass media. I was impressed by the impact the new book had on the city's non-specialist reading public, who enthusiastically bought all available copies and avidly read and discussed it in the following months.This should come as no surprise, given Fernando Ortiz's impact on Cuban intellectual life throughout the twentieth century. Besides his activities as a researcher and public intellectual, Ortiz was a real institution builder. In 1907 he joined the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, a learned society that since the late eighteenth century had dedicated itself to the mission of promoting the study of Cuba's economy, society, and culture. As its president between 1923 and 1959 (when it was closed by the revolutionary government), Ortiz gave the Sociedad a new impetus as a sort of national modernist think-tank. During those years he also edited the institution's Revista Bimestre Cubana, a journal that he turned into one of the main forums for twentieth-century Cuban intelligentsia. Among the important institutions he created were the Sociedad de Folklore Cubano, an association of folklore studies (1923); the Institución Hispanocubana de Cultura, a cultural association of exchange with the Spanish modernist vanguards (1926); the Panamerican Institute of Geography (1928); and the Alianza Cubana por un Mundo Libre (1941), an anti-fascist organization.But it was mainly in the field of Afro-Cuban studies—a field of his own founding—that Ortiz left his indelible mark on Cuban intellectual life. Having coined and disseminated the term "Afro-Cuban," in 1937 he created the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos, a scholarly association dedicated to the field (see Bronfman 2004). The several journals he founded and edited along his life were also important venues for the publication of Afro-Cuban studies. Ortiz was also closely related to Cuba's most important visual artists and writers, and had a strong impact on the artistic milieu of his time. His work was especially influential on afronegrismo, an artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated Cuba's mestizo heritage and used Afro-Cuban motifs in poetry, novels, music, dance, and visual arts (see Kutzinski 1993, de la Fuente 2001). For all these reasons, Cuban intellectual Juan Marinello called Ortiz, following his death, "the third discoverer of Cuba"—after Christopher Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt (who visited and wrote about the country in the nineteenth century)—an epithet by which he is still widely known in Cuba today.Outside his native island, Fernando Ortiz became better known for creating the concept of "transculturation," which he introduced in Cuban counterpoint. He proposed it as an alternative to the idea of acculturation, which he criticized for supposing that in the encounter between two societies one of them would simply lose its culture and adopt that of the other. This was fundamentally wrong, according to Ortiz, because the process of cultural contact and change never moves in one direction only. Rather, all cultures in contact transform each other and create a new culture, different from the original ones. He gave this process a central role in the interpretation of his own country: "the real history of Cuba is the history of its intermeshed transculturations" (1995: 98). Nowhere else, he claimed, did transculturations happen so quickly and powerfully, and did they so many traditions this this concept read as a of the of cultural hybridity that for so many Latin American intellectuals their other Latin American who saw hybridity as to their that which made them Ortiz also attributed a to the concept of He first introduced it to that it adopted in sociological (1995: and not only in the study of Cuba. He it in "the better the different of the process of from one culture to because this not in Although it was most and in Cuba, Ortiz all 98). That he saw a for his concept beyond Cuba is also by the that it was at the of the exchange he with in person and by (see and Ortiz's wrote the preface to the original of Cuban his to the idea of Ortiz (1995: himself the in the of the book, of this of his What is more, according to Ortiz had an English translation in and the of his book following on the of an this to the that Ortiz gave a to This for Cubanness and had a for all of It was the of human history that Cuba to the to with the of the lecture it was one of the Cuban factors of of the concept of to the nationalist goals and of "The human factors of published in the same year as Cuban counterpoint. In this lecture, Fernando Ortiz to a Cuban whom he as and whom he to a of to understand national on are his to and to in the the not at The between the book and the lecture is more one that Ortiz several in texts, for in the that the of the groups that to Cuba and their on the island. In the lecture, his is to of a culture, the culture of it from a by which he that is and Although terms could as the to that between and to Ortiz's In his one could have having that is, one could Cuban with the also that this first the most oppressed and marginalized that is, and In his did not from it from first this one of the in many national(ist) in Latin America and that the authentic of nationhood is to the indigenous peoples, However, Ortiz is not that are more Cuban than but only that they have Cuban than That is, his point is not about culture and essence, but about and to silence those who are as the of nationhood 1993, Lomnitz Ortiz the and of the oppressed in the of a national the of "The human factors of cubanidad" in the culinary metaphor it to This Ortiz is most typical and most complex made of various of which we call and of pieces of of this is with until it a very and he Cuban mestizo culture is composed of cultural European and African, but also North and to different cultural are in a of between the initial in which they Cuba and the of into that the author Cuban culture is of and of many and that with each and into one social ajiaco metaphor an that is in several across the that of often their ethnic as and that the of their imagined them to their Ortiz in this lecture is doing precisely the He that no one in indigenous peoples, who also from one has the of he and are mostly This of is the of the various that Ortiz throughout the at most to Cuba's but, like and else, they were and never in the The only that are real are the that into the on the of Ortiz's have a to we What is the ajiaco not a a of them until they are and In with them in a in the But then them in a that, by by real that are mixed in a Fernando Ortiz a view of culture and Cuban culture is an it into or in it is to in its This is to the of other of In his come to Cuba in and "the of the was by of American is a that that but also to their and Cuban history is of and In is a concept of After it is into that Cuban are in to and a real ajiaco is of "The human factors of cubanidad" as a ajiaco of and the by a could also become a for a of a culture in the all the that are into it a Fernando Ortiz this cultural but he that in and of Cuba and new cultural never the The ajiaco as a metaphor precisely because it is and is never ajiaco new are available and the and mixture never This is important because Ortiz in the and in the process of think that it is to for in this of new and by the of the human in Cuba. 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Reviews of Books

When Cuba threw off the yoke of Spanish rule at the end of the nineteenth century, it did so with the help of another foreign power, the United States. Thereafter, the United States became involved in Cuban affairs, intervening twice militarily (1898-1902 and 1906-1909). What was the effect of U.S. intervention? Conventional wisdom indicates that U.S. intervention hindered the rise of militarism in Cuba in the early years of statehood. This pathfinding study, however, takes just the opposite view. Jose M. Hernandez argues that while U.S. influence may have checked the worst excesses of the Independence-war veterans who assumed control of Cuba's government, it did not completely deter them from resorting to violence. Thus, a tradition of using violence as a method for transferring power developed in Cuba that often made a mockery of democratic processes. In substantiating this innovative interpretation, Hernandez covers a crucial phase in Cuban history that has been neglected by most recent U.S. historians. Correcting stereotypes and myths, he takes a fresh and dispassionate look at Cuba's often romanticized struggle for political emancipation, describing and analyzing in persuasive detail civil-military relations throughout the period. This puts national hero Jose Marti's role in the 1895-1898 war of independence in an unusual perspective and sets in bold relief the historical forces that went underground in 1898-1902, only to resurface a few years later. This study will be of interest to all students of hemispheric relations. It presents not only a more accurate picture of the Cuba spawned by American intervention, but also the Cuban side of a story that too frequently has been toldsolely from the U.S. point of view.

In the United States, farm-workers are traditionally excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) which guarantee basic rights to workers, including the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. In a sense, farm-workers are confined to a secondary market characterized by substandard wages and labor conditions. This study explores how migrant farm-workers in North Carolina have responded to their labor conditions with a campaign that culminated in the achievement of the first labor contract for guest-workers in US history. Based on ethnographic research, it reflects upon the role of grassroots organizing in challenging a culture of racism that has remained dangerously alive in many parts of our society.

Most modern states take a keen interest in food production and farming. Governments pursue a variety of aims in this realm—from ensuring food supply and stabilizing farm income or consumer prices to protecting national or regional foodsheds. Multiple policy regimes regulate agriculture and food production, fundamentally shaping domestic and international markets for food and agricultural commodities. Though many political goals remain quite similar over time and across different economies, how policy regimes function and what their effects are have varied widely. Even one type of policy in one economy rarely affects all constituents equally. Policies redistribute resources via public programs or via the price and supply of commodities, variously shaping incentives for producers and consumers in different sites. A place-sensitive approach to studying the political economy of food produces analytical maps that draw attention to how policy regimes interact with particular locales. Such an approach could grasp, for example, how agricultural policies affect rural and urban constituencies differently. Urban constituencies tend to benefit from policies that address the affordability, quality, and reliability of food and the cost of producer-support programs to taxpayers.