Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba

Abstract

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.