Socioeconomic Adaptation: Cuba, 1990s
Cuba and
North Korea have much in common. Both are
socialist developing countries and centrally
planned economies. During the Cold War, both
countries thrived on subsidized imports of
oil and other goods from the communist world
and had an industrialized agriculture based
on the wasteful use of fuel, fertilizer,
pesticides, electricity, and other inputs.
With the demise of the Soviet Union in the
early 1990s, both countries plunged into a
deep economic crisis due to the interruption
of such subsidized imports.
Until
1989, Cuba enjoyed excellent terms of trade
with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Sugar and other export staples were sold for
solidarity prices propping up the Cuban
economy for political reasons, while raw
materials and industrial products were
bought for friendship prices equally
benefiting the Cuban economy. Such was the
largesse of the Soviet Union and its
European clients that Cuba gained
significant amounts of hard currency from
re-exporting oil to third countries. The
Cuban industry could also rely on support
from the communist world for machines and
know-how. The food sector counted on
subsidized imports of wheat, milk powder,
animal feed, fertilizer, pesticides, and so
on.
All of
this came to naught in 1990 when
preferential trade with the Soviet Bloc
collapsed, forcing Cuban leader Fidel Castro
to proclaim a national emergency called the
“Special Period in Time of Peace” (Mesa-Lago
1993). As a result, Cuba faced an
energy supply disruption similar to the one
experienced by North Korea. When taking into
account the fact that heavily subsidized oil
deliveries from China to North Korea lasted
until 1993, the Cuban supply shock was even
more abrupt and dramatic. Subsidized energy
supplies from the Soviet Bloc ceased to 100%
from one year to the next. The CIA
(1996, 9) calculated the decline of
Cuban fuel imports between 1989 and 1993 at
a whopping 71%.[i]
The
crisis entirely devastated the Cuban
economy. Machines lay idle in the absence of
fuel and spare parts. Public and private
transportation were in shambles, with people
walking and cycling long distances or riding
on modified vans called “camel buses.”
Workers had difficulty getting to their
jobs. Factories and households all over the
island were struck by rampant and
unpredictable electrical power outages (Pérez-López
1995, 138-140).
As in
North Korea, the most painful effects were
felt in the food sector. From a daily chore
under real communism, the procurement of
food became a real source of anxiety to
consumers. The nutritional intake of the
average Cuban, especially protein and fat,
fell considerably below the level of basic
human needs (Alvarez 2004, 154-169).
Consumers resorted to chopped-up grapefruit
peel as a surrogate for beef, and some
people started breeding chickens in their
flats or raising livestock on their
balconies (Pérez-López 1995, 138).
Despite
such considerable hardship, Cuba was far
more resilient than “self-reliant” North
Korea. Common people in Cuba were not dying
from malnutrition and starvation. Homeless
people and gangs of street children, turned
into scavengers, were not characteristic
features of Cuban townscapes. Nor were
violence, crime, desperation, and
hopelessness characteristic features of
Cuban neighborhood life (Taylor 2009,
144-145).
This is
in remarkable contrast with North Korea.
Although reliable accounts are in short
supply, reports from North Korean exiles
indicate that during the 1990s everyday life
in the so-called Hermit Kingdom was
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Natsios
2001). As mentioned, famine killed
as many as 3–5% of the North Korean
population. While life was certainly hard
during the Special Period, nothing of that
sort happened in Cuba.[ii]
The
immediate reaction of the Cuban regime was
predictable: mobilize the masses for food
production, and revitalize the state sector.
Townsfolk were sent to the countryside for
farm labor, but after more than forty years
of real communism there was little
revolutionary fervor left in the population.
Also, the state sector was too sclerotic to
be converted from sugar and coffee to
potatoes and beans. Despite world market
prices for sugar below production costs,
state farms continued to produce sugarcane (Burchardt
2000).
The next
response of the Cuban regime was cautious
liberalization and reform. To begin with,
the regime moved from toleration to the
controlled legalization of certain
black-market and informal-sector activities.
To attract hard currency, the country was
cautiously opened to Western tourists. The
US dollar was legalized as a parallel
currency. Control over numerous state farms
was partly devolved to the employees and
management. All of this contributed to a
burgeoning informal and semi-informal
sector, which quickly took on its own
dynamic and significantly contributed to the
provisioning of the Cuban population (Pérez-López
1995; Padilla Dieste 2002).[iii]
This
strategy was not only more flexible and
pragmatic but also considerably more humane
than the approach taken by Havana’s
communist counterpart in Pyongyang. Overall,
the regime in Havana enlisted the Cuban
population in an aggressive import
substitution program. The policy was a tall
order for a country that continued to suffer
from the historical trade embargo imposed by
its most obvious economic partner, the
United States. As a consequence, tractors
had to be substituted with oxen, and
fertilizer with manure, in order to
revitalize agricultural production and feed
the population.
At any
rate, the real miracle was performed by the
Cuban people. Against all odds, ordinary
people managed to get by due to the
remarkable cohesion of Cuban society at the
level of local communities and
neighborhoods. Although Cuba is highly
urbanized, the typical barrio is an
urban village. Cuba’s multi-generational
family households are tightly embedded in
neighborhood life. The typical household is
shared by an extended family including
aunts, uncles, and cousins. One-person
households are very rare. Most families have
lived in the same home for generations. The
occupational structure tends to be mixed,
with some members of a household working in
the official sector, others in the informal
economy, and yet others dedicated to
reproduction and care. People cultivate
close relationships with friends and
relatives inside and outside their barrio
(Taylor 2009; cf. Rosendahl 1997;
Jatar-Hausmann 1999).
One
should not idealize this. In the early
1990s, families were stuck in their homes
because the regime had frozen the property
structure after the revolution. Thus, people
were cramped into narrow spaces because they
had no other choice. The regime had invested
in community cohesion not so much to create
social glue, but rather to sustain political
control. Moreover, communitarian
neighborhood life is not just cozy. It is
also replete with gossip and strife (Pertierra
2011; Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon 1978).
Be that
as it may, what ultimately matters is that
most Cubans could rely on their families,
friends, and neighbors. In a survey, 86% of
people from vulnerable neighborhoods in
Havana declared that they could count on
support from relatives, 97% from friends,
and 89% from neighbors (Taylor 2009,
142). This local solidarity, or
social capital, helped ordinary Cubans to
make ends meet during the Special Period. As
one inhabitant of a vulnerable neighborhood
put it, the crisis brought people closer
together because it forced them to rely on
one another (as quoted in Taylor
2009, 140).
In the
countryside, there were deliberate efforts
to link people with the land. Labor
organization on state farms was shifted from
collectivist “brigades” to the territorial
organization of workforce by ranches (granjas)
and farms (fincas), which were
further subdivided into dairies (vaquerías)
and plots (lotes). State farms and
agricultural cooperatives were expected to
provide their own food, both for canteens
and for private consumption. Some factories
had workers cultivate land to cater to their
food needs. Elsewhere, workers were
encouraged to have their own small plots
where they could produce food for their
families. Thus, localities in the Cuban
countryside became increasingly
self-sufficient (Deere, Pérez, and
González 1994).
Traditional
knowledge was another decisive factor in
feeding the population. Although most land
had been collectivized after the revolution
of 1959, about 4% of Cuban farmers had kept
their land. Another 11% was organized in
private cooperatives (Burchardt 2000).
The survival of traditional family farms and
private cooperatives alongside industrial
agriculture turned out to be an important
asset. Independent farms were more resilient
to the crisis than state farms because they
operated with less fuel and agrochemical
inputs. Cuba’s surviving family farmers kept
alive important traditional knowledge that
could now be recovered. Other formerly
independent farmers had moved to towns and
cities, where they provided valuable
know-how for urban agriculture.
Urban
agriculture was a local self-help movement,
facilitated by the availability of
traditional knowledge in combination with
technologies of organic gardening and the
Cuban-specific rustic ingenuity. Idle
stretches of land between concrete blocks or
in urban peripheries were turned into
makeshift organic gardens. Vacant or
abandoned plots in close vicinity to
people’s homes were transformed into
plantation sites. People used whatever urban
wastelands they could occupy to grow
vegetables and other foodstuffs.
The
movement was purposefully augmented by the
regime, but the real action was at the
grassroots level. By the mid-1990s, there
were hundreds of registered horticultural
clubs in Havana alone. An urban cultivator
from Havana explained: “When the Special
Period started, horticultural clubs were
organized by farmers themselves (…). Special
emphasis was made to involve the whole
family in these activities (…). We wanted
also to develop more collaboration and
mutual help among ourselves; we exchanged
seeds, varieties, and experiences. We
achieved a sense and spirit of mutual help,
solidarity, and we learned about
agricultural production” (as quoted
in Carrasco, Acker, and Grieshop 2003, 98).
Again,
one should not idealize this.
Environmentalists have exalted urban farming
during the Special Period as a social
experiment, or even as an alternative model
of organic agriculture.[iv]
In reality, Cuba’s detour into low-input
agriculture was obviously driven not so much
by ecological consciousness as by dire
necessity.[v]
From the second half of the 1990s, when the
economic situation improved and agrochemical
inputs became more available again, many
reforms were aborted, and Cuba started
drifting back to industrial farming (FAO
2003; Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López 2005).
This was helped by subsidized oil deliveries
from Venezuela. At the same time, foreign
investment enabled Cuba to cover about half
of its oil and gas consumption from domestic
sources (Economist Intelligence Unit
2008, 24-25).
Nevertheless,
it is highly encouraging to note that,
during the early and mid-1990s, Cubans
managed for a few years to mitigate an
extremely disruptive energy scarcity by
their remarkable community ethos. The
comparison with North Korea shows that this
was not a minor achievement.
Notes
[i] Official Cuban figures for
the decline of imported raw materials
and other vital inputs to industrial
production and electricity generation
were on a similar level (Wright
2009, 68). Even according to
the most conservative estimate of the US
Energy Information Administration,
between 1989 and 1992 oil consumption in
Cuba fell by 20% and the net consumption
of electricity by 22% (http://www.eia.gov/countries/,
viewed on 10 February 2013).
[ii]
In fact, Cuba is sometimes cited in the
popular literature as a favourable
contrast to North Korea (e.g.
Pfeiffer 2006; Wen 2006).
[iii] To some extent, Cubans
were helped in their efforts to cope
with the crisis by a benign climate,
remittances, foreign investment, and
international aid.
[iv] See for example
Rosset and Benjamin (1994); Altieri et
al. (1999); Funes et al. (2002); Cruz
and Sánchez Medina (2003).
[v] Also, it is important to
note that the Special Period had mixed
effects on the environment; see
Díaz Briquets and Pérez-López (2000).
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