Reply #3: Food Security in Cuba (longish, but very interesting.)

[Judi Lynn]

Food Security in Cuba
by Sinan Koont


Sinan Koont teaches economics and is coordinator of Latin American Studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He thanks numerous friends and colleagues in the United States and Cuba for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

In 1996, Via Campesina, the recently formed international umbrella organization of grassroots peasant groups, introduced the term “food sovereignty”: the right of peoples and states to democratically decide their own food and agricultural policies and to produce needed foods in their own territories in a manner reinforcing the cultural values of the people while protecting the environment.

A related but distinct concept of “food security” has been defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to include, among other aspects: (1) the production of adequate food supplies; (2) stability in the flow of these supplies; and (3) secure access, both physical and economic, to available supplies for those in need of them. Recently, Cuba, unlike most other countries in the world, has had to grapple with these questions under circumstances that would try most people’s souls.

In the Caribbean, neither the history of colonial domination, including slavery and monoculture agriculture based on export crops, nor the climate, tropical and unsuitable for feed-grain production, allow for the easy satisfaction of food needs with local production. This has been made more difficult by the post-1990 disintegration of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the collapse of Cuban exports and imports and the loss of the preferential terms of trade of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil. In addition, during this time there has been a tighter U.S. blockade and increasing U.S. hostility. This is the “periodo especial” (special period) announced by Fidel Castro in 1990. By 1993, as Cuban production and imports plummeted, the daily intake of the average Cuban citizen had descended to 1863 kilocalories, including 46 grams of protein and 26 grams of fat, all figures well below FAO recommended minimums for a healthy diet.

It was obvious that something had to be done, and a rapid increase in imports of foodstuffs or inputs to food production was out of the question. The bywords for food security, by necessity, had to be self-reliance and, to the extent possible, self-sufficiency: a tall order for any Caribbean economy, and doubly so for an economy under a hostile blockade by a powerful neighbor.
(snip/...)

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0104koont.htm

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5 year old article on "organiponicos:"
http://www.dal.ca/~dp/reports/ztaboulchanas/taboulchanasst.html



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More about Cuban "organiponicos:"

Green guerrillas
In the face of desperate urban food shortages Cubans have been
encouraged to grow their own - organically.


....Jorge and his neighbours got help from Havana’s Urban Agriculture Department, part of a program which began in January 1991 to encourage city-dwellers to grow their own food. In addition to these huertos populares (popular gardens), the Government has cleared the way for an impressive system of larger organic gardens called organoponicos. Sometimes these are run by the State (the Cuban military has dozens of them), sometimes they’re connected to a particular workplace and used to funnel vegetables directly to the employees. And at times they operate as self-financing small businesses. Organoponicos tend to be larger than the private gardens and are run with meticulous care.

My guide this morning, Manuel Gonsalvez, is an extension worker from the Urban Agriculture Department. He is an energetic 38-year-old with a tooth-brush moustache and a backward baseball cap. One of his main tasks is to show people how to garden without chemicals.

Jorge complains to him that his peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers are being devoured by pests. Manuel listens, then explains what can be done. ‘By planting a mixture of plants (some Spanish oregano here, some marigolds there) around the food crops you use nature to your advantage. You end up with a biological struggle, a system of good bugs and bad bugs which create an equilibrium.’
(snip/...)

http://www.newint.org/issue301/green.htm

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a Havana market

Here's a brief, sketchy report by a student on a Spring Break trip she took to Cuba with schoolmates. Any awkwardness or confusion you may see in her report is probably due to her inexperience, no doubt, and lack of actual information on Cuba prior to her visit. (So many of us have had NOTHING but rumors and intentionally misleading propaganda to live on all our lives!) I just discovered it in a search:

We started our trip in Havana, the capital of Cuba. Walking around the streets and markets, it was hard to take in all the sites, smells and sounds of Cuba. People gathered in doorways, sitting on steps. Little girls dancing in the street. Boys playing stick ball with small bats and tennis balls. Open doorways and windows to apartments with Spanish guitar music and smells of Cuban food floating outside. "Hey friend, where you from? Taxi? Cigars?" from every third person. And of course the cloud of "psst psst" from the local men to the women in our group.

It was many times easy to forget we were in a "Third World" country. The main streets were relatively litter-free. Beggars were not as prominent, needy or persistent as other countries some of the students had visited. In a country with guaranteed housing and no homelessness to speak of, free health care and education and low division between family incomes, problems that normally plague a Third World country are relatively low. Over the next few days, we saw some of these socialist guarantees up close. We talked to an administrator at one of the top hospitals in the country who explained the medical system. It is largely preventive rather than purely curative and insures a physician for each Cuban family. The administrator expressed the ill-effects of the U.S. embargo on the system, such as the shortage of some medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. Any technology made with over 15% of American parts are banned from Cuba, and American medical journals must travel around the world before they reach Cuba.
(snip)

Second off, as outsiders, we grew to assume that the people were more paranoid about the rules than necessary. Many Cubans we talked to felt constrained because they were not free to travel outside the country, were required to show their ID to any policeman who randomly asked them for it on the street and were not supposed to talk against the government, at least not publicly. But yet, we heard reports that people do travel easily and do openly speak their mind. Ironically, the "illegal" interaction between us Americans and the Cubans was what made the trip come alive. Whether we were getting fed in the Cuban homes in Havana, being talked into buying their goods in the streets or getting schemed into buying them rum after they showed us a night hang-out spot overlooking the city, bonds formed despite our governmental conflicts.


At the end of the CDR meeting in Pinare del Rio, the children walked around handing us their addresses and retrieving ours. A boy I had quickly became friends with invited me into his parentÆs house. His family ran from room to room offering me food, a place to sit, a chance to watch their TV. I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable and suspected that they wanted money or American goods in return for their kindness. I quickly left the house and returned to the party. After we had left the meeting and I reflected over the experience, I realized maybe it was my own country rather than his that had made me feel uncomfortable around this misjudged boy in his misunderstood land.
(snip/)

http://www.sid-vienna.org/CUBA/CUBA_report.html