"In this history of Cuba, Louis A. Pérez proposes a new Cuban counterpoint: rice, a staple central to the island's cuisine, and sugar, which dominated an export economy 150 years in the making. Pérez shows how the logic of the sugar trade resulted in the development of an agriculture for...

For the Dominican Republic, as for many Caribbean islands, sugar once defined the export sector. But times have changed, and the history of exports is less dominated by sugar in the Dominican Republic than in most Caribbean islands. In more recent history, agricultural exports have diversified...