Why Cuban Agriculture is Such a Mess

Notes and sources

It is no real secret that Cuban agriculture is a mess. Contrary to the myth of Cuban food self-sufficiency, based on organic agriculture and urban food gardens, that were popularized by Peak Oil activists in the 2000s and which were doing the rounds until only a few years ago, the country imported 60-80% of its food by the 2010s. The food Cuba did produce was no longer organic either; after the fall of the USSR in 1991 the country had no money for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but by the 2000s they were on the rebound and by the 2010s they were a normal part of agriculture again. In one rural Cuban town I visited frequently in undergrad circa 2010, one person tried to steal bananas from a local plantation only to be accidentally poisoned by the pesticide that was mixed in with the water used for irrigation, leading him to be sent to the hospital in a comatose state. The real question, at this point, is ‘why’.

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This is easily the topic for a whole series of books, even supposing we had the archival access that would allow us to have the full statistical data, on the one hand, or notes on what was being discussed at the decision-making level in the council of state. In truth, we have only a partial picture of the full mess that is Cuban agriculture. Further complicating things, I am not a specialist either in agriculture generally nor Cuban agriculture specifically. This is a big part of why I have held off on writing something like this; doing a full deep-dive on something that isn’t my specific expertise would involve probably half a dozen books and a couple dozen articles. Eventually, though, I realized that this desire to basically do an academic article worth of research for a blog post was holding me back.

First, it was an unrealistic expectation of myself. If I tried to hold back on writing anything for the public until I had basically done a mini-dissertation on a topic, I was almost never going to write and was going to dread even starting. Second, it was an unrealistic expectation of what my readers would even want. As long as I am transparent about my limits, focus on the key datapoints that are pretty clear, and recommend sources for those interested in digging deeper, I can play the role that people are looking for of giving them a grasp of what the hell is going on and why without needing to go into increasingly esoteric rabbit holes.

So, that’s what this is. Hopefully this approach will help me get out a lot of things I have been hoping to write but keep putting off because I was approaching each one like a mini-dissertation instead of just explaining what I know, what I don’t know, and what sources exist for those with the time and inclination to dig deeper.

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Cuba has been importing a large chunk of its food for a very, very long time. According to historian Louis Pérez Jr., whose book Rice in time of Sugar is a great primer on the political economy of rice production on the island, the country has been dependent on food imports since at least the end of the 18th century. This makes sense because, as Pérez explains, the island becoming a major sugar exporter during this period led to a significant amount of agricultural land being increasingly dedicated to sugar exports, the profits from which were then used to import food.

This isn’t exactly unusual either; early colonial Virginia famously faced hunger because so much land was dedicated to tobacco and so little to food crops that price fluctuations or delays in food shipments could be deadly. Cuba was instead joining a long list of plantation societies in the early modern Atlantic world who made the (at times disastrous but certainly lucrative) decision to prioritize export crops over food crops on good farmland.

This trend then continued not only throughout the rest of the colonial period, ending in 1898, but even right up to the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s. It is true that we see increasing diversification of agriculture from the 1930s, because the sugar quota arrangement with the US traded stagnation for outright decline as global sugar prices fell, Cuba was still dependent on food imports when Fidel Castro and his rebels entered Havana in 1959.

After the Revolution comes one of the great transformations of Cuban agriculture; the first and second agrarian reforms. These break-up the great landed estates (latifundia) as well as the mid-sized farms of the Cuban farmer, such as the coffee growing peasantry of the Escambray Mountains, who then become the backbone of the only sustained armed resistance to the revolutionary government by the country’s post-1959 history. The agrarian policies of the Cuban Revolution then took the country’s agriculture off a cliff.

The polite way that the great Cuban academic Juan Valdés Paz put it in his classic book Los procesos agrarios en Cuba, which unfortunately has never - to my knowledge - been published in English, is that the policies of the 1960s were centered on ideological considerations over scientific and practical ones. Cuba returned to sugar like never before after 1959, relying more and more on sugar exports to the USSR and its Eastern European satellites to fund not just its daily needs but - hopefully - the industrial infrastructure that would permit it to modernize and diversify its economy. The 60s and early 1970s were a mad dash of mass mobilizations of workers, even doctors, to harvest and process sugar cane for export. This was also a period of increased forced labor regimes, such as the infamous UMAP, of which I’ve written previously, as the government used every mechanism it could in order to increase output. Even so, Cuba repeatedly failed to meet its contractual quotas for export to the USSR and its Eastern European allies, while continuing to import massive amounts of consumer and capital goods, leading to it falling multiple harvests worth behind on its trade obligations.

Relations between Havana and Moscow increasingly soured and were in a fairly bad place by the late 1960s. A classic book that talks about this is Yuri Pavlov’s book on Soviet-Cuba relations, but in the last decade we have achieved an even deeper understanding of the topic. One example is Anne Gorsuch’s article on diplomatic and popular relations between the two countries, which shows how the popular Soviet euphoria of the early 1960s, which saw Cuba as a young emulator of their revolution, gave way to disappointment and resentment by the end of the 1960s, as more and more aid was sent with little to show for it. Even more to the point, Radoslav Yordanov's recent - excellent - book Our Comrades in Havana, shows how even the satellites were losing patience. Czechoslovak intelligence noted in the late 1960s how Cubans were buying sugar on international markets and then shipping it to Eastern Europe in Cuban sacks at higher prices, claiming it was domestically made sugar. The Bulgarian archives also have Raúl Castro recognizing that the country was a mess in the 1960s largely for domestic policy reasons, not the embargo. As Yordanov’s book takes pains to point out, the core issues were that to the USSR and Eastern Europe that

• neither actually needed Cuban sugar, and actually bought it at significantly above global market price (sometimes double or more) mostly as a way to help Cuba out.

• Cuba was not even engaging in classic Soviet agriculture, for all its problems, but a voluntarist model premised on moral incentives over just basic good organization and scientific principles.

What did this look like in practice? Cuba pushed most of its peasantry, many of whom had been overjoyed to get their own plots of land, onto collective state farms. As with Soviet style kolkhozes, these were fairly unproductive compared to capitalist agriculture and often came with growing pains, such as the sacrifice of farm animals and the destruction of other goods by peasants as a form of passive resistance. You also had the armed resistance of the Escambray mountains, which last into around 1965, which end only because the region was forcibly depopulated and its civilian population spread across Cuba in small enclosed cities, again echoing Soviet policies, where they were closely monitored.

They then supplemented this output with the use of mass forced labor (gulags) and the mobilization of the youth for economic ends during their years of obligatory military service (SMO). Added to this was mass mobilization on a ‘voluntary’ basis by the general population, who often did a fairly poor job due to lack of material incentives as well ad lack of practical knowledge or experience, leading to cane being harvested improperly and thus wasted or being harvested and then left to rot (cane requires rapid processing after harvest). By the end of the 1960s, whether purely for ideological reasons or because the country was so bankrupt it lacked anything with which to pay people, the state increasingly leaned on ‘moral’ incentives (social pressure, basically) to make people work extra for wages whose purchasing power that was humble to begin with, kept falling in real terms, and increasingly had nothing left to buy at state stores anyway (hence rising inflation). The urban economy was also in freefall, as the 1968 Grand Revolutionary Offensive took over even mid-sized and small businesses owned by Cubans, ‘taking away even the scissors from barbers,’ which the state was not able to administer properly, often leading to their collapse within a few years. If in the early 1960s people felt hopeful and the state could be very generous in redistributing goods and services to the population, by the end of the decade the economy was reaching its breaking point.

This model eventually reached its breaking point around 1970, when the famous ‘harvest of the 10 million’ tons of sugar ended in failure. In the early 1960s Fidel Castro had arbitrarily set the goal of Cuba harvesting and processing a record 10 million tons of sugar, as an achievement and benchmark which would demonstrate that the country was prospering and growing under the new revolutionary regime. The harvest fell well short of the 10 million ton goal and national GDP actually shrank, as the disruption caused by constant mass mobilization by essentially the entire working population to meet harvest goals led to every other aspect of the economy suffering. Fidel, in a rare moment of contrition, took personal responsibility for the failure and cried on national television.

The 1970s were a period of recovery. Instead of mass mobilization, idealism, ‘moral’ incentives, and voluntarism, the new economy was based on the flawed but still superior Soviet agrarian model, sustainable growth, and scientific management principles for the economy. Fidel also, mercifully, took a step back from micromanaging agriculture to focus on mismanaging other aspects of domestic and foreign policy during the 1970s. In gratitude that he had increasingly been brought to heel, both in domestic terms and on foreign policy (see response to Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and curtailing of support of revolution abroad), the island was permitted to join the COMECON. This was a sort of economic union for the USSR, its satellites, and revolutionary regimes abroad that aligned themselves with Moscow over Beijing (Mongolia and Vietnam would also join). Developing countries, like Cuba, would get extremely generous terms of trade, as developing countries under Moscow’s wing, and in exchange would follow a baseline of domestic governance and foreign policy that kowtowed to Soviet goals and expectations.

During the 1970s and 1980s Cuba not only reined in Fidel’s worst tendencies, though the Soviet model came with its own problems, but towards the end even began to rediversify its economy. The famous example is of course the biopharma sector that Fidel encouraged and financed from the 1980s, one of the few bets of his that paid off handsomely, but in agriculture you also see a more strategic and rational planning regime for the country, where certain provinces would specialize in exports like citrus, instead of just sugar. The country had come a long way from the Coffee Cordon trainwreck of the late 1960s when an arc of fruit trees around the capital were cut down and replaced with coffee plants that - as every farmer knew - could not produce in the plains around the city, preferring mountains; despite massive investments of time, capital, and labor, it is unclear if even 1 ton of coffee ever came from this huge effort.

A cornerstone of this agrarian model under Cuba was massive amounts of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. Like, a gargantuan amount even for a developed country, per Conquering Nature by Sergio Díaz-Briquets. It was also premised, for its farm animals, on steady and cheap supplies of animal feed from abroad, supplemented by feed made from sugar industry byproducts. When the USSR and its satellites fell in 1991, this would prove its Achilles heel.

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Ok, so Cuban ag was not doing especially great in the Cold War, but by the end of the period it was at least on the road to being somewhat stable and productive compared to the chaos and voluntarism of the 1960s. What, then, did the fall of the USSR bring to Cuba?

First, the lack of gasoline for machinery, replacement parts for infrastructure, feed for animals, and - most importantly - a special market that paid double or more than global market rates for its output disappeared. This would have destroyed even a better working system, but Cuba’s - built in a bubble - received a knock-out blow, leaving it prostrate for years. While Cuban agriculture began to recover somewhat with the reintroduction of regular supplies of gas, inputs, animal feeds, etc., in the 2000s thanks to Venezuela picking up the bill instead of the USSR, it had by then ceased to be the economic motor of the Cuban economy. Instead, the state pivoted to tourism in the 1990s and even with inputs and some credit restored, agriculture would continue to atrophy to the present. With the all powerful state the only real source for investment, credit, etc., the choice of the state to prioritize tourism over agriculture for decades has meant that even with some access to foreign inputs, the sector is a shadow of its former self.

Second, this finished the process of the decline and fall of the Cuban sugar sector, begun decades before the Revolution had even taken power. Sugar was a luxury good in the 17th century, accessible to middle class buyers in the 18th and 19th centuries, and by the end of the 19th century it was increasingly a cheap stable for the developed world’s working class. This is a global phenomenon, not one exclusive to Cuba, and Sydney Mintz’s classic Sweetness & Power tracing this in outline. By the early 20th century Cuba was increasingly caught in boom-bust cycles around sugar, where extraordinary conditions could produce ‘the dance of the millions’, as WWI did, but which otherwise saw a steadily declining global market price for sugar. In addition to the fact that productivity was increasing in sugar producing countries, meaning ever higher output, many developed countries - the best markets for sugar - had their own solidly built sugar industries now. States in temperate climates, like European ones (including the USSR itself), had beet sugar industries both for economic reasons (no need to spend hard currency on sugar imports) but strategic ones (in case of war domestic production could provide for a bare minimum, ergo it merited protection from market forces, meaning foreign sugar had to be even cheaper in order to compete). The sugar quota system that Cuba entered into, where it would provide a set percentage of the US’ total domestic consumption, postponed the sector’s collapse, but in exchange for stability it allowed the sector to enter into a period of profound stagnation. There was less and less profit to be had, ergo many foreign investors (especially Americans) pulled out of sugar, leading to the ‘renationalization‘ of the sugar sector in the hands of Cuban capitalists, like the famous Julio Lobo. This is a large part of why there was so much rural discontent and poverty in Cuba; as the big cities grew increasingly industrialized and raced after tourism dollars in the post-WWII tourism boom years of the 1950s, rural and especially Eastern Cuba increasingly fell behind. This is how you have the disconnect between figures for national prosperity that people like to trot out, showing the country was actually doing pretty well by Latin American standards, and so much fury at the status quo that many were willing to risk it all not just to overthrow Fulgencio Batista - whom most hated - but shoot for an overthrow of the status quo ante as well. The USSR’s massive subsidies to Cuba, provided by purchasing Cuban sugar at double or at times triple market prices and even extending credit for purchases from Soviet production that was never called in, helped to revitalize the sector until its fall in 1991. However, post-1991 Cuba was thrown back into the global market with the added disadvantage that its transition away from sugar had been delayed by decades while it was now a latecomer to tourism, which other historical sugar producers in the Caribbean and beyond had been investing in back before Cuba even had its Revolution.

Third, and related to points one and two, is the failure to reform the sector. It is no coincidence that both China and Vietnam’s market reforms started, in earnest, with their agricultural sectors. Market reforms both took much of the administrative burden off of the state, brought down food prices, stimulated demand for other goods and services by farmers who now had growing purchasing power, and thus stimulated producers of other goods and services to fill the void. Together with, in the Chinese case at least though Vietnam may have done this too, using their diasporas to build up investment in their respective countries and experiments like Special Economic Zones, which aimed for big foreign firms to invest in areas with low taxes and other benefits, these reforms proved central to their post-Cold War economic booms. Cuba did not reform its ag sector, or more specifically it only partially reformed it in such a way as to not really fix the core problem of incentives. Instead of a full on series of state farms, Cuba now transitioned them to reformed and slightly more decentralized kolkhoz style economic units. These nominally worker owned cooperatives had to sell a large part of their output to the state at prices set by the state, depended on the state for payments that the state often struggled to make on time, lacked credit to reinvest in modernization, and could not rely on the state to provide inputs like fertilizers or equipment like tractors. The state would also alternate between attempting to monopolize transportation to markets, which it lacked the trucks and gas and overall organizational capacity to do leading to many crops rotting while waiting for pickup, and permitting third parties to transport goods in trucks owned by private sector, but these took advantage of the disfunction, lack of good transportation infrastructure, and their role as middlemen to jack up the prices. Remember that most Cubans have been unable to live on their government salaries since at least 1991, with real purchasing power wavering between just barely enough to cover food if you were smart and - right now - an entirely symbolic wage. The state compensated by subsidizing basically everything; electricity, many food stuffs through rationing system, etc., but currently lacks the funds to even reliably provide subsidized goods; hence periodic protests for chicken and bread and cooking oil. Why the state has refused, or failed, to reform this sector is a bit of a mystery, while I have my own theories, but whatever considerations have prevented it in the past, the failure to reform it has severely aggravated every economic crisis that the country has had since 1991.

Fourth, both in the 1990s and now, under the current economic crisis since the late 2010s, the rural economy has become severely decapitalized. By this I mean that cattle, pig, and chicken stocks have dwindled, with some animals having to be sacrificed simply because there wasn’t enough feed for them. Stocks of cows, sows, and chickens needed to rebuild Cuba’s ability to produce the meat and other products their offspring provide have been reduced by between 25-75% depending on the animal, according to various state estimates. Irrigation equipment and tractors are often obsolete, there isn’t enough gasoline to run a lot of the infrastructure, and per some farmers I spoke to ‘they want us to return to oxen but there aren’t even oxen anymore’. This compounds the problem of kolkhozes being less productive than capitalist agriculture, leaving farmers who already had pretty abysmal productivity to produce a fraction of their potential output per hectare. This then compounds the hard currency crisis as the state is forced to buy food in US dollars, which it desperately needs for other essential imports like oil for cars and its electric plants. Instead of addressing this crisis of decapitalization by reinvesting in the sector, which would decrease the need for importing so much of its food and even provide hard currency through exports of everything from avocados to coffee and chocolate, the state’s policies focus on surviving until tomorrow. Instead of reforming it by turning it over to private sector actors who might modernize it, Fidel dismantled most the state sugar sector in 2005 and in recent years the country has begun to import much of its sugar. When I was there last there was a chronic sugar shortage, especially the flavorful brown sugar that Cubans love to add to their coffee, which is also imported. If in the 2010s Cuba imported 60-80% of its total food consumption, the current figure must be insane. There are no chickens, so the state imports chicken meat (mostly from the US). There are no eggs, so they import cartons of eggs (again mostly from the US). They import sugar from wherever they can, they import coffee, they import chocolate, they import milk products, they import rice; it is a country that almost no longer produces anything, and what few products it still exports (tobacco products and marabú based coal for cookouts) are nowhere near enough to offset the fundamental problem that the system does not work.

Fifth, and here is an especially thorny one, is the issue of urbanization. Over a century ago, 9/10ths of the population of the world lived in rural areas while only 1/10 lived in cities and towns of various sizes. Today, most people live in cities and towns and the traditional peasantries of much of the world have given way to capitalist farmers or corporate plantations of various kinds. I am, of course, simplifying, and there’s still plenty of peasants out there, but what I mean is that if in the past the peasantry was the majority of the world, today the average person lives in a city. Cuba is not exempt from this by any means, having seen its population urbanize along with the rest of the world since long before the Cuban Revolution. The problem, it seems, is more that while in countries with capitalist economies the loss of armies of peasants with cheap labor costs you saw this compensated for partly through solutions like migrant labor and increasing productivity through modernization, Cuba’s countryside is increasingly depopulated as well as decapitalized. An ever shrinking rural labor force, working in hard conditions for less than stellar pay, simultaneously contends with the lack of not just tractors but currently even shortages of oxen with which to plow, not to mention fertilizers and pesticides. In China and Vietnam, despite the disastrous effects of their own collectivization efforts in agriculture, both countries were able to depend on large reservoirs of cheap rural labor, even if they couldn’t provide these with fleets of tractors and the like to help kickstart things. In Cuba, there’s neither, largely because they have waited so long to reform the sector that the countryside is increasingly abandoned. Cuba’s surface area of good farmland is about 6.3 million hectares, of which (according to the Ministry of Agriculture) only about 2.7 million hectares are actually under cultivation (42%). Despite limited experiments with reforms, where the state tried to get people to return to the land on limited tenure based deals where they would have more autonomy to produce what they wanted, the state has been unable to convince people who leave agriculture to return, and those that remain in ag lack the capital to do modern agriculture.

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This has been a shot at summarizing what is wrong with Cuban agriculture and why. While the embargo does play a role in all this, it is not the core issue. Cuba can, and does, export many agricultural products abroad, especially to Western European customers. It can and does import large quantities of food, in hard currency and without the option of credit, from US ag states. The problem of kolkhozes being incapable of competing with capitalist agriculture is an old and well documented one, not something to be left at the feet of the US. Even when the country enjoyed massive subsidies from Venezuela during the oil boom of the 00s and early 2010s, a golden opportunity to modernize its agricultural sector if there ever was one, the country continued to import most of its food and the leadership continued to refuse to reform their ag sector.

Instead, here we sit, far downstream of decades of neglect and austerity financing for the ag sector, as all the unresolved problems of the last half century crash into each other in the rapids of the current crisis. Next to us are the various government officials and ministers, and the leadership of the army, who are largely insulated from the worst of what is going on. The ones drowning are everyday Cubans. It makes sense that so many would prefer to swim to the shore nearby, just 90 miles away.