Cuba's Sugar Industry

Following forty years of tension between Cuba and the United States, this study of Cuba's agroindustry presents the results of a remarkable collaboration between researchers living in the two countries. The authors consider the prospects for the sugar industry - offering scenarios of a smaller, more efficient role in the economy - and examine reforms of the early 1990s. The book begins with an overview of the 1959-79 period and then focuses on the next twenty years, when the industry was heavily subsidized by the Soviet Union. It discusses the future of a restructured industry, including the importance of sugar by-products and derivatives, potential competition between the United States and Cuba, and interests the countries share. No book of this scope about the sugar industry has been published in or outside Cuba. It offers the balanced perspectives of the coauthors, who visited cooperatives, state farms, sugarcane collection centers, self-sufficiency plots, mills, refineries, alcohol distilleries, by-product enterprises, and research institutions. In the process they conducted interviews with officials and specialists at the sugar and agriculture ministries. An important reference for those interested in the future of the sugar industry and for scholars in the areas of agricultural economics and commodity trade, this book also will be valuable for analysts following political and economic developments in Cuba.