Sin azucar no hay pais: La industria azucarera y la economia cubana (1919-1939) (review)

Antonio Santamaría's Sin azúcar no hay país is an important and extremely valuable book that is an essential addition to the personal libraries of economic and business historians of 20^th century Cuba. Santamaría focuses on the development of the Cuban sugar industry during the interwar period and links its developments with those in the larger Cuban economy. In addition to economic and business historians, scholars of Cuban political or social history will profit from this volume.

Scholars such as Oscar Zanetti, Alejandro García, and Alan Dye have produced recent works specifically on the sugar industry in the 20^th century. Santamaría draws much inspiration from these authors, and demonstrates throughout this volume command of the topic and intimate familiarity with key primary and secondary sources. Of immense value is the eighty-page statistical appendix. Through Santamaría's creative utilization of statistics, especially those collected from the Memoria Azucarera, Anuario Azucarero de Cuba and Farr's Manual of Sugar Companies, he paints a detailed portrait of the Cuban sugar industry during the tumultuous years 1919–1939.

Santamaría's study is animated by the question of why the crisis of the 1920s and 1930s did not shift the basic economic orientation of the island. He notes that the exporting sugar industry continued to dominate Cuba's economy, while at the same time other Latin American economies became increasingly centered on import-substituting industries.

Santamaría calls attention to the successful, if painful, adaptation of the Cuban sugar industry to the changed conditions of the interwar period, during which falling sugar prices and protectionism abroad threatened its survival. The sugar industry responded to the crisis of the 1920s and 1930s with production restriction, export regulation, the intensification of grinding, and by focusing not just on raw sugar, but also molasses, rum, and refined sugar. Government-enforced production restriction and export regulation was highly controversial, but by ensuring that all firms had access to markets and by preventing the price of sugar from falling even further than it did, it preserved large segments of the industry that might otherwise have ceased to exist. Santamaría carefully reconstructs the process of intensification, through which mills were able to maintain relatively low unit costs despite cuts in total output. The mills had a shorter grinding season, used less but higher quality cane, and reduced employment of labor and fuel consumption. The human cost of this intensification for laborers was high: the same flexibility of the Cuban labor market that permitted mills to lower variable costs also implied large cuts in wages and hours that were catastrophic for workers. Through this wrenching process, the Cuban sugar industry emerged in the late 1930s with improved industrial yields (sugar output per unit of cane input) and labor productivity. Santamaría, employing international comparative data, demonstrates that these improvements enabled Cuba to maintain its comparative advantage in the production of sugar. This evolution on the supply side was combined with important demand-side developments that ensured a more stable market for Cuban sugar: the establishment of the U.S. sugar quota system in 1934 and the successful negotiation of the International Sugar Agreement in 1937. Santamaría argues that the passage of reform legislation after the 1933 revolution, most famously through the Sugar Coordination Act in 1937, did not raise the costs of mills enough to counteract the improvements that had been made, partly because the laws incorporated incentives for mills to increase productivity. Thus, the evolution of supply-side, demand-side and governmental factors during the crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s did not put an end to the preeminence of the export-oriented sugar industry in Cuba.