The "Greening of Cuba"
Notes and Comments

Bob Sheak, January 29, 2002

Introduction

"The Greening of Cuba" is a "Food First" video-film by Jaime Kibben and is produced by the Institute for Food and Development Policy located in Oakland, California. The video runs about 38 minutes. Its focus is on the efforts by Cubans since about 1993 to convert a significant and growing part of their agricultural system from an export-oriented, industrial-based agricultural system to an organically-based one that, as its first priority, is designed to provide food for the Cuban population itself.

Before the revolution

Prior to the 1959 revolution, Cuban agricultural was dominated by large, often foreign (mostly U.S.), landholders, who controlled the most fertile land for sugar production and the production of other crops for export. Sugar represented eighty percent of the country’s exports. The Cuban campesinos, or farm workers, who were employed by these landholders were highly exploited, lived in extreme poverty with no worker or human rights, and received virtually no educational opportunities or health care services from the government. These dire conditions generated a steady migration of the rural population to the cities, especially to Havana. However, there were few opportunities in the cities for decent jobs. This kind of agricultural system, and the related impoverishment of the rural population, is still prevalent through much of Latin America, where the best land is concentrated in the hands of a few rich and powerful domestic or foreign families or agribusiness corporations, while the majority of the rural population finds itself in one of the following circumstances: (1) having only small parcels of (often marginal) land on which they barely subsist, (2) working under highly exploitative conditions for the large landholders, (3) squatting illegally on the idle land of the large landholders to eke out a subsistence, in continuous danger of being evicted by government troops or para-military gangs, (4) becoming migrant farm workers who move among large farms in a given country or across national borders trying to scratch out a living, or (5) ending up migrating to the cities in an often futile search for better opportunities, typically descending into a harsh impoverishment with no end.

1959-1993 - After the revolution: the growth of the industrial-based agricultural system

The first Agrarian Reform Law

After the revolution, In May 17 of 1959, the new Cuban government enacted the first Agrarian Reform Law, "putting a limit on land holdings and expropriating the remainder with compensation offered in 20-year fixed-term government bonds paying an annual interest rate of 4.5 percent" (Franklin 1997, 21). It was to go into effect on June 3^rd. According to Franklin, the "basis for compensation is the value of the land as assessed for taxes." This was typically an assessment that had for decades under-valued the land in order to keep taxes low. Foreigners, many of the American, owned 75 percent of Cuba’s arable land, including five U.S. sugar companies that owned or controlled more than two million acres had benefited from these low taxes for decades. The new law offered them compensation that was considerably lower than the true value of their land, but it reflected the rules they had played in the prior self-serving assessments.

The new law limited land ownership to 1,000 acres, with an exception of up to 3,333 acres for land used for livestock, sugar, or rice production. The expropriated land, combined with land already owned by the state, was transferred to cooperatives or distributed free of charge in "Vital Minimum" (VM) tracts to "any agricultural worker with less than a VM tract (66 acres of unirrigated fertile land for a family of five)" (21). The effects of the agrarian reform were enormous in their consequences. "After 1959, about three-quarters of Cuba’s agricultural land was confiscated from private landowners and converted into vast, Soviet-style farms," which were to dominate the countryside until the early 1990s (Hatchwell and Calder 2000, 44).

The large American landholders (e.g., United Fruit Company) and the U.S. government protested against the Agrarian Reform Law, especially against the terms of compensation. Franklin (1997) writes: "U.S. landowners object to Cuba’s basis for compensation because it is based on the assessment rates, which have not been adjusted to current land value for 30 to 40 years (thus allowing the owners to pay very low taxes)." At the same time, the new Cuban government under Fidel Castro was able to negotiate compensation agreements "with property owners of Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and Sweden" (22).

Early goals undermined by U.S. embargo

The leaders of the Cuban government had hoped to create a diversified agricultural system that was less dependent on sugar, but when the U.S. government closed off its markets to all Cuban products, events took over. Enriquez (2000) describes the situation as follows:

"The country's overwhelming dependence on sugar was the subject of disdain of the revolutionaries who overthrew Batista's regime in 1959, and agricultural diversification was a high priority for them in the early 1960s. But by mid-1962, in the face of the U.S. embargo, a growing foreign deficit resulting from the Cuban government's various efforts to promote diversified economic development more generally, and the Soviet Union's offer to purchase growing quantities of the country's sugar production, this crop once again came to be seen as the key to development. Although the precise nature of Cuba's sugar trade proved to be more positive than that which had characterized it in the past, diversification of agricultural production reverted to being a medium- to long-term goal."

The development of an industrial-based agricultural system

Enriquez (2000) emphasizes that the initial agricultural reforms, aimed at broadening ownership and participation in agriculture, were gradually transformed again toward greater centralization in the form of large state farms. Many small farmers were absorbed into the state farms, which dominated agriculture until 1993. Indeed, prior to 1993, "state farms and about 180 agro-industrial complexes cultivated 82% of Cuba’s arable land" (Baker 2000, 82). State officials assumed that large farms are more efficient, because they can be organized around an industrial agricultural model based on increasing reliance on mechanization, non-organic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides, and on a hierarchical division of labor in which the farm workers are given specific responsibilities for only a part of the agricultural process (e.g., seeding a particular crop, but not harvesting it). This is an agricultural model that became widespread throughout the world after WWII and is often associated with the Green Revolution, based on hybrid, fast-growing seeds, non-organic inputs, advanced irrigation systems, and intensive mechanization. Enriquez (2000) notes that "one of the earliest efforts Cuba made to raise the level of technology employed in production was directed at mechanizing the sugar cane harvests. During the 1960s and 1970s machinery was also developed to channel cut cane onto vehicles for trans-shipment to the refinery and to clean the cane that had been mechanically harvested, prior to its refining." Mechanization was not limited to sugar production alone. Similarly, Enriquez (2000) writes, "chemical fertilizers and pesticides had come to prevail in all sectors of agricultural production… and in food crop, as well as sugar cane, cultivation." Moreover, "specialized animal feed became the basis of state and CPA livestock industries."

The weaknesses of "industrial" agriculture

There are a number of serious weaknesses associated with the "industrial" agricultural model, as developed in Cuba or in other developing countries. First, it fosters dependence on foreign markets. It is sometimes referred to as agroexport agriculture. Second, it fosters dependence on foreign-produced chemical inputs and tractors (and spare parts). Third, it tends to neglect food production for domestic consumption and, correspondingly, requires high levels of food imports, often too expensive for the large number of poor people. Fourth, the large state farms typically fail to organize production efficiently. Fifth, the high levels of mechanization, coupled with poor work and living conditions, leads farms workers to leave the countryside for the cities. And, sixth, the model has innumerable detrimental effects on the environment (soil, water), on the farm workers, on contamination of the food that is produced, and on the need to constantly increase the levels of fertilizer, pesticides, and insecticides (e.g., creating a "pesticide treadmill" effect).

There were benefits

For all its shortcomings, the agricultural system, along with other parts of the economy, access to Soviet markets, subsidies from the Soviet and Eastern European governments, and a commitment by the Cuban government to egalitarian and social values, helped to generate important benefits for the Cuban people. Peter M. Rosset (2000) refers to some of them: "Prior to the collapse of the socialist bloc [in 1989], Cuba had achieved high marks for per capita GNP, nutrition, life expectancy, and women in higher education, and was ranked first in Latin America for the availability of doctors, low infant mortality, housing, secondary school enrollment, and attendance by the population at cultural events."

But the Cuban agricultural system was being artificially propped up by the extraordinarily favorable terms the country received for its exports. Rosset (2000) notes: "During the 1980s, Cuba received an average price for its sugar exports to the Soviet Union that was 5.4 times higher than the world price. Cuba also was able to obtain Soviet petroleum in return, part of which was re-exported to earn convertible currency" (205).

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the effects of the U.S. embargo

When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did Cuba’s source of pesticides, fertilizers, tractors, machinery replacement parts, and petroleum. The U.S. embargo intensified the crisis, exacerbating the momentous shortage of food that suddenly afflicted the Cuban people. A report by Global Citizen emphasizes these developments as follows: "In 1990, when trade with the socialist bloc collapsed, trade with most capitalist countries was still embargoed. Suddenly Cuba lost half its food supply and most of the fuel, fertilizer, feed, and pesticides it used to produce the other half." Enríquez (2000) describes these catastrophic events in more detail:

"Within a few short years imports from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had fallen dramatically: in 1990 alone Cuba experienced a 25 percent shortfall in USSR petroleum imports from the quantities stipulated in bilateral agreements drawn up between the two nations; by November 1991 food shipments from the USSR had fallen below agreed upon amounts by more than 50 percent. Because at least 80 percent of Cuba's imports and exports had been channeled through the COMECON during the 1980s, the trade alliance's disappearance had drastic consequences for the Cuban economy generally, and its food situation in particular. Almost overnight the country's relatively modern agricultural sector, which had been so heavily dependent on imports, was partially crippled, and the population's levels of food consumption experienced a severe contraction."

In addition, the Bush administration tightened the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba on October 23, 1992. The U.S. President signed the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA), "which closed U.S. ports to all foreign vessels carrying goods to or from Cuba (for 180-days) after docking in a Cuban port." This anti-Cuban legislation had been promoted by Congressman Robert Torricelli (D-NJ). Its transparent goal was to deepen the economic crisis in Cuba, with the hope that somehow the Castro government and its "communist" system, would collapse. In the meantime, the U.S. embargo intensified the crisis, including the food crisis, of the Cuban people.

 

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