Hi.
This is a lecture about food collapse using Cuba as a case study.
I hope in the next few minutes as we talk about this together to look at a specific
example of a collapse that occurred within modern times, and a collapse that occurred
within an active and functioning geopolitical environment.
Today's lecture is drawn primarily from two sources.
The first is a book called "Unfinished Puzzle: Cuban Agriculture: The Challenges, Lessons
& Opportunities."
This is a book that was commissioned by Oxfam to look at Cuba's historical food policy and
to look at the numbers and some of the statistics behind it.
The second book is called "Farming Cuba: Urban Agriculture From the Ground Up."
This is a book that is primarily a public planning, an urban architecture book.
It is concerned with design and form, and looking at that in conjunction with food sustainability,
and looking at how different architectural forms work to support sustainable food and
local food, agriculture, urban agriculture, and looking at it particularly in the context
of Cuba.
So, Cuba is a country that has gone through a collapse in the recent past.
So, for this lecture we are primarily going to consider a case study in the collapse of
a collapse in food infrastructure.
It is a great example because it really pushes back against the idea that collapse necessarily
has to look like apocalypse, like everything shutting down and you are scraping for survival.
That is not what happened in Cuba.
Instead, Cuba's collapse occurred in the context of a globally connected world, and throughout
its challenges Cuba remained connected in various ways to different parts of the global
community.
They remained embedded in a very active geopolitical environment despite the fact that they were
experiencing a collapse in their food agriculture.
It is important to situate Cuba in the context of its history as well, and just as a caveat
by necessity this lecture is really going to simplify a lot of Cuba's story and leave
out a lot of important details.
The story of Cuba's history is told very differently depending on the perspective that the person
telling the story takes.
A lot of different stakeholders in its history, and there is a lot of really passionate different
perspectives on this.
I am not going to be able to talk about all of it.
I am going to try and talk about just within the perspective of what Cuba went through
is informative for what food infrastructure resilience might entail in the future.
So, as a base Cuba is a nation in the Caribbean that consists primarily of one large island.
There is a picture on the map here on the left showing you Cuba in yellow.
It is approximately 150 miles south of Florida.
It has about 11 million people in it, and that is about 60% of the population of New
York State for comparison.
11 million people total, but about 2 million of those people live in the capital city or
surroundings of Havana.
This is a quote from one of our books, "From the 15th to the 20th century, Cuban agriculture
developed in a socioeconomic and political context marked by feudal and semi-feudal colonial
regimes, followed by neocolonial capitalism.
In1959, an anti-imperialist guerilla revolution led by Fidel Castro, "Che" Guevara, Camillo
Cienfuegos, and Raul Casto Ruz started a new chapter in Cuban history with the establishment
of a socialist state."
So now, in contrast to capitalism a socialist state is marked by a commitment to government
ownership of most of the means of production, and at the same time cooperative management
of the economy.
So practically speaking, this means that individuals do not typically own their land and they are
assigned jobs by the government.
The government also decides which industries, which factories, which farms etc., are going
to be built, how they are going to be staffed, what the people that are staffing them are
going to be paid, and the prices on many of the goods.
Those prices are often set by central planners, and the prices don't change in response to
market forces, at least not dynamically in response to market forces.
If they change, they change over time.
This is a really important part of this story because although socialism, like capitalism,
has benefits and weaknesses, the strong control of the socialist Cuban government forced the
Cuban society to undertake actions that were important in weathering the food collapse.
Some of the strong control was not perhaps what the Cuban people would want, but it helped
them to establish policies and reactions to policies that the Cuban people were developing
on their own that helped them to survive this collapse.
Prior to the revolution, prior to Fidel Castro taking over, the majority of the farming land
in Cuba was held in large sugar cane plantations.
These were ranches or estates called latifundios, and the emphasis here should be on large.
These organizations owned about 95% of all large farms in Cuba.
25% of those latifundios, large farms, were owned by foreign interests, primarily American
foreign interests.
In 1957 it is estimated that 10% of the landowners owned 73% of the agricultural land.
So, this is a statistic that demonstrates a highly unequal distribution of resources
in the sector.
So, 10% of the landowners owned 73% of the agricultural land.
If you put that in comparison of what we have in the United States, the United States has
a much more distributed ownership of land.
So, as a reference point in 1993 8% of the landowners owned 50% of the farm land.
So, a fewer number of people owning less farmland.
As another point in comparison to Cuba's unequal distribution of land ownership prior to the
revolution, in the U.S. in 1999 the ownership had become more distributed where 4% of the
landowners controlled about 15% of the farmland, and in the U.S. also as a point of comparison
with Cuba's foreign land interests, in the U.S. only about 1.7% of the farmland is foreign
owned, or was foreign owned.
Most of that was by Canada and the Netherlands.
So, this is to demonstrate that prior to the revolution there was a serious and legitimate
concern about the unequal distribution of farmland in Cuba, and that it was owned by
foreign interests as opposed to people in Cuba.
This was one of the reasons that the revolution occurred in the first place.
So, after the revolution occurred with respect to agriculture one of the first steps that
the new socialist government did was to re-patriot that farm land making some of it state owned
and then parceling out smaller tracts to the Cuban people.
So, the land was taken from the people who owned it, foreign interests, the large farm
owners, and were managed by the state and given to small Cuban farmers, Cuban farmers
who farmed small parcels of land.
This was done through the First Agrarian Reform Law in May 1959, and there were two concerns
that the revolution was trying to address through this first agricultural reform.
The first was the holding of large tracts of land by a few people, and the second was
the holding of large tracts of land by non-Cubans.
That was the first reform.
Well, as a result of the redistribution of American-owned property, basically the property
being stolen from the people who owned it, and as the result of the resulting partnerships
that Cuba formed with enemies of the U.S., so the land was taken from the U.S. interests
and then Cuba established partnerships, military, security and political partnerships with U.S.
enemies, the U.S. instituted a trade and travel embargo on Cuba which eventually came to prevent
almost all exchange of goods and services with Cuba.
Among famously embargoed items were Cuban cigars.
The second step the revolution took with respect to agricultural reform was called the 2nd
Agrarian Reform Law, and that was taken in 1963.
This law redistributed medium-sized farms which were not nationalized by the first law.
So, the first Agrarian Reform took the large farms, the second one took the medium farms,
and these medium farms were also taken over by the state government and parceled out in
smaller portions to Cuban farmers.
Ultimately, the state ended up taking and owning approximately 80% of these farms and
allowed the rest to be owned privately.
Together these moves, these first two reforms pointed towards the socialist ideal of giving
the land to the tiller, or allowing the people who worked the land to own the land.
Of course this came at a direct and very high cost to the people in organizations who previously
owned the land and from whom the land was taken by eminent domain.