Archives for the 'cuba' tag
Papaya Riots in Cuba
Cuban farmers must sell most of what they produce at state mandated prices. But after they meet their quotas (typically about 70 percent of their output) they are free to sell the rest at farmer’s markets, or agros. At the markets, prices are higher, but there are plenty of choices and the stalls feel abundant compared to the often-empty shelves of the state groceries:
At one such market this week, a chalkboard read “there are potatoes,” meaning spuds could be purchased with Cubans’ monthly ration cards. Besides that, a single produce stand sold only plantains, taro root and onions.
“They want to make all the markets like this. Sad,” the lone vendor said.
Price controls on food come and go in Cuba, with the state permitting market mechanisms in times of extreme scarcity, but then cracking down again once things get better:
Producers, sellers and customers said they heard from party officials that new price controls were set to begin Nov. 1 — but were postponed until January after a public outcry unheard of under the totalitarian government….
The agros [farmer's markets] first appeared in the 1980, when food shortages forced a reluctant Fidel Castro to allow farmers to sell produce at prices driven, at least in part, by the free market. Castro shuttered them six years later to improve foundering state agricultural production.
“They closed them for some of the same things we are talking about now: the black market, middle men making all kinds of money, the government unable to control the market, the food supply,” Messina said.
But the small dose of capitalism returned in 1994, when Cuba was again forced to allow more free-market enterprise to keep its people from starving after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which gave Cuba billions in annual subsidies.
The state takes 6 months to pay farmers for official production, so many farmers are tempted by the agro truckers, who generally bribe the police to turn a blind eye and pay farmers in cash upfront. Raul Castro is threatening to crack down.
The whole AP story is worth reading for a good sense of the background on this issue and what’s going on right now.
Via Crispy Reader and new food blogger Annie!
Semi-crossposted at Reason.com.
Should We Try to be Like Cuba?
That’s the question Slashfood is asking, citing a Philly Inquirer article that, hyperventilating, calls the backward island nation’s urban farming program “a stunning success.” Via Slashfood:
Yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer had an article praising Cuba’s urban farming program for being able to supply much of Cuba’s vegetables. It also provides 350,000 jobs with considerably high pay. Futhermore, it has increased food options for a country that was heavily dependent on a diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe. With a population that is 80 perecent urban, it would only make sense for them to develop an urban agricultural agenda.
Since the majority of people in the United States live in urban areas, it seems like this model might help relieve the current food shortages. Can cities like New York City adapt the Cuban program?
Heavens to Mao no! No, no no!
As an urban farmer in America–I think my 625 sq. ft. or so plot qualifies me, over my dead body will or should any “program” force us to de-industrialize and become a nation of urban farmers. Small businesspeople, of which farmers are a subset, indeed form part of the backbone of our economy. But so too do the researchers, investment bankers, universities, professional sports teams, and corporations.
Every society strives to emerge from subsistence farming. The principal struggle of man over the millennia has been to move from the forest to the farm to the cities–and not so we can farm some more.
Take Ireland, once a nation of potato farmers. When blight struck, millions died tragically in an horrendous famine. People couldn’t wait to leave. Many emigrated.
It wasn’t until Ireland started to become a technologically advanced society that people wanted to live there–and showed it by immigrating to the country.
We don’t want to mimick Cuba in this or any other of its backward policies. No country does. No country should.
Food at the Fore of Cuban Government’s Baby Steps
It’s only taken five decades, and it hardly seems dramatic to outsiders who enjoy daily freedoms, but the Cuban government is finally moving–glacially–to recognize private property and private employment.
In a country where almost everyone works for the communist state, dairy farmer Jesus Diaz is his own boss. He likes it that way — and so does the government.
Living on a plot of land just big enough to graze four dairy cows, Diaz produces enough milk to sell about four quarts a day to the state.
This is independent production on a tiny scale, but it has proved so efficient that Cuba has decided on a major expansion of its program to distribute underused and fallow farmland to private farmers and cooperatives.
More here. IMO, a regime that’s ruined its citizens’ lives for half a century doesn’t deserve any credit for finally accepting the obvious. Learn about the guy at the top of the list of probably billions of people who could have told Cuba so here.
