Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Letras Hispanicas, 528) (Spanish Edition)

This book is basically an extended essay in which the author uses the metaphor of sugar and tabacco to define Cuban society. Sugar is foreign, represents Europe and capitalistic greed, requires slavery and has ruined Cuban society, whereas tabacco is pure, Cuban, and represents the small farmers who could have built a true democracy in Cuba, rather than the oligarchy of slaveholders brought to Cuba by sugar. Follows the same intellectual tradition of Rodó (Ariel), Hernández (Martín Fierro) and Echeverría (La cautiva and El matadero).

Contrapunteo del tabaco y el azúcar is one of those books that should have been a pamphlet. While an interesting look at the growth and production of tobacco and sugar and at the racial tension represented by the brown and the white, its power is lost in the redundancy and volume of the book.