Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
foreign companies and domestic elites, and was dedicated to producing
sugar for export. Farmworkers lived in poor conditions, largely in
shacks without running water, and nearly half were illiterate. After the
revolution, the government nationalized much of the land, keeping the
majority under state control while turning nearly a third over to worker
cooperatives. However, reliance on export-oriented agricultural strate-
gies continued, as socialist countries purchased Cuban sugar under stable
and preferential terms (Alvarez et al. 2006). The Soviet Union fi nanced
Cuba's embrace of Green Revolution technologies (Funes et al. 2002).
In 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union created a food crisis. Cuba
had imported two-thirds of its foodstuffs, and nearly all of its fuel and
machinery. Industries were forced to close and public goods, such as
transportation and power plants, worked at minimum capacity. The
crisis was worsened when, in 1992, the United States tightened its
embargo by blocking shipments of food and medical supplies. Seeking
to increase production while coping with limited inputs, the Cuban gov-
ernment reorganized its agricultural economy. Large portions of state-
owned land were given to cooperatively organized farmers, increasing
local control. Government research and extension focused on promoting
biodiversity rather than specialized monocultures, and in developing
low-cost inputs that could be produced on the farm such as compost and
biological pest controls. Campesinos who had farmed prior to the intro-
duction of Green Revolution technologies played an important role in
this research, as did promotores from the Campesino a Campesino move-
ment. Additionally, Cuba promoted urban agriculture and community
gardens, and opened farmers' markets where producers could sell surplus
(Alvarez et al. 2006). Yields fell initially, but recovered soon afterward
and Cuba has maintained high standards of living and life expectancy
and low rates of diet-related diseases (Amador and Peña 1991). For this
reason, Rosset and Borque (2002, xv) triumphantly describe recent
Cuban history as “the overcoming of a food crisis through self-reliance,
smaller farms, and agro-ecological technology.”
In practice, the Cuban agricultural sector mixes state, cooperative,
and private ownership. The number of state-owned farms has decreased
since the revolution, with parallel increases in locally managed coopera-
tive and family farms. The latter often remain part of cooperative asso-
ciations through which they access credit and other services. Additionally,
state enterprises can enter into partnerships with foreign capital, and
have begun to do so. Levins (2002), however, argues that these transfor-
mations in land ownership refl ect reorganization within socialism rather
