Sugar is at the heart of Cuban history, and this splendid addition to the literature on sugar, society, and politics opens up valuable windows on Cuba’s historical development. The core of this impressively researched book (which employs a range of Cuban, US, and British archival sources) is an examination of two sugar communities, Tuinicú and Chaparra, from the 1860s to the coming of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The two sites are chosen with care. Tuinicú, an older (but soon to be modernized and massively expanded) mill in southern Las Villas Province (later Santa Clara) looked back to the formative years when sugar cultivation was concentrated in western and then central Cuba. Chaparra, situated in northwestern Oriente Province near Puerto Padre, was anchored in the newer and most dynamic centers of sugar cultivation developed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Both sugar mills were part of the growing US...

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