[News] Food is Freedom - Cuba’s Other Revolution

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Weekend Edition June 7-9, 2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/07/cubas-other-revolution/

<http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/07/cubas-other-revolution/#>
*Food is Freedom*


  Cuba’s Other Revolution

by CARMELO RUIZ-MARRERO

/“During the Special Period’s most difficult years, countless and 
creative solutions were found by our campesinos and agricultural science 
researchers. There was one objective and one priority: to recover our 
agricultural systems and produce what’s necessary to feed ourselves. 
However, we needed integrating and modeling concepts for the changes 
that were now indispensable, and we found them in agroecology.”/

- Orlando Lugo-Fonte
President of the National Association of Small Farmers of Cuba (1)

Cuba is the one country in the world that has made the furthest strides, 
and in the shortest time, in moving from industrial conventional 
agricultural production to organic farming. This achievement has been 
celebrated and documented by numerous experts and observers, including 
land reform scholar Peter Rosset and agroecologist Miguel Altieri, 
academic bodies like the Latin American Scientific Society of 
Agroecology (SOCLA), and NGO’s such as Food First and the Worldwatch 
Institute, and have been the subject of a 2006 documentary, titled The 
Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2).

The country was in a very unusual and critical situation at the 
beginning of the 1990’s. With the implosion of the Soviet block, the 
subsidies that Cuba received in the form of food and farm inputs ceased 
overnight, causing an unprecedented crisis. With the Torricelli and 
Helms-Burton Acts, passed in 1992 and 1996 respectively, the American 
embargo tightened its noose around Cuba’s economy, further worsening an 
already dire scenario. But the Caribbean island nation pulled through by 
way of a successful transformation of its agricultural model, moving it 
towards agroecological production largely based on small family farms.

Back in March in the Colombian city of Medellín I had the great pleasure 
of spending time with Cuban professors Fernando Funes and Luis Vásquez, 
both of them scientists of international renown and faculty members of 
SOCLA’s doctoral program (3). Between long walks through the city center 
and over beers in the Pilarica neighborhood, we talked at length about 
the challenges of agriculture, ecology and socialism. This article is 
based on those conversations and on published writings by Funes and 
other authors.

Funes says that following the withdrawal of Soviet support, “the 
critical situation created in Cuban agriculture propitiated the 
transformation of the agrarian structure and the reach of a new 
technological, economic, ecological and social dimension, with the end 
of achieving food security with new methods and strategies.” (4)

But before seeking to apply the Cuban experiences to other countries and 
contexts it is necessary to consider the country’s unique and 
extraordinary circumstances. The 1959 revolution and subsequent sweeping 
land reform were a unique happening in Latin American history: the 
landed ruling class was defeated, uprooted and expelled. The country’s 
wealth and land were redistributed; and as a result, access to land is 
not a problem, and all farmers in the country enjoy first-rate free 
education and health care. Latin America’s land-owning elites, assisted 
by the murderous US counterinsurgency, have not spared any resources, be 
they financial, ideological or military, to prevent another Cuban-style 
revolution in the Western hemisphere.

Nevertheless, many of Cuba’s lessons can be learned and applied in other 
countries. One of the key elements in the success of agroecology and 
food sovereignty in Cuba has been the support of the state. The Cuban 
experience demonstrates that a successful transition to agroecology 
requires major involvement by the public sector. The country’s organic 
revolution contradicts the common image of the Cuban government as 
bureaucratized and lacking in creativity or imagination. If the Cuban 
state were as inflexible and inefficient as the revolution’s derisive 
critics make it out to be, it would not have taken the right measures, 
and in a rapid and decisive manner, to avert a fatal food crisis.

Among the concrete steps taken by the government are the establishment 
of 276 centers for the reproduction of entomophages and entomopathogens 
(organisms that are natural enemies of pests), a National Urban Farming 
Program with 26 subprograms that span the production of vegetables, 
medicinal plants, condiments, grains, fruit, and animal breeding (hens, 
rabbits, sheep, goats, pigs, bees and fish) that are developed 
throughout the country, and a program for the promotion of ecological 
agriculture within the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP).

Funes explains the fundamentals of this ecological agrarian revolution: 
“These advances went from the use of biopesticides and biological 
controls, to different applications of biofertilizer, compost, earthworm 
humus, biosoils, animal traction, etc., on a grand scale and in a rapid 
manner.” The techniques explored and developed also included 
polyculture, rotation, intelligent use of nitrogen-fixing legumes, and a 
great variety of ecological solutions for pest and weed problems.

Along with innovation also came full acknowledgement of ancient 
traditions of great relevance and usefulness. Says Funes of the Cuban 
campesino sector’s recovery from the crisis:

    “A mixture of traditional farming practices and organic
    fertilization common in the Cuban countryside, brought in from
    Europe by Spanish immigrants centuries back, and appropriate
    strategies for climate management, phases of the moon and many times
    even religious beliefs and sayings embedded in peasant wisdom, no
    doubt permitted this sector to be the one that showed a most
    convincing recovery- and in the least amount of time- to the crisis
    of inputs.”

But state action by itself, though necessary, is not enough to carry 
agroecology forward. This has been proven in Venezuela, Bolivia and 
Ecuador, where progressive governments oriented by Bolivariano 
anti-imperialist ideals fully favor food sovereignty and ecological 
agriculture and have made of them official state policy. These 
governments issued directives to this effect to the public universities 
and agriculture ministries, but nothing happened. Bureaucrats, 
agronomists and academic scholars raised and formed in the green 
revolution model of US-style industrial mechanized chemical-intensive 
farming, simply ignored the dictates from the higher echelons and 
continued doing what they had always done: promote monocultures and 
pesticides while ignoring the new agricultural practices and discourses 
that originated from ecology and grassroots mobilization.

Not to say that nothing was achieved there. The Andes region is one of 
the world’s hotbeds of peasant-based agroecological innovation, and 
Venezuela hosts the Paulo Freire Latin American Institute of Agroecology 
(IALA). But bureaucratic resistance from the mid-layers of government 
has thwarted the potential for a truly profound transformation of 
agriculture. The achievements of these three South American countries 
pale in comparison with Cuba’s organic revolution. How did Cuba do it?

Cuba prevented its organic agroecological revolution from suffering a 
bureaucratic death thanks to a combination of decentralization and 
participatory models. State enterprises were broken up into Basic Units 
of Cooperative Production (UBPC). According to Funes, this has given 
farmers the liberating feeling of being owners of the land they work by 
giving them real protagonism in decision-making processes, which has 
resulted in increased productivity. The word he uses is autogestión, a 
Latin American word that describes processes of self-management and 
enhanced individual autonomy in small-scale enterprises.

One of the hallmarks of Cuba’s agroecological revolution is the 
development of innovative and novel participatory methodologies of 
agricultural research with horizontal processes of discussion, 
validation and adaptation of new ideas and proposals. These 
methodologies, which owe much to Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed”, are known collectively as campesino a campesino (peasant to 
peasant). Born in the Mesoamerican region in the 1970’s, CAC has 
revolutionized ecological farming all over Latin America and is 
spreading all over the world. Its remarkable history is told in Food 
First director Eric Holt-Giménez’s book Campesino a Campesino: Voices 
from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable 
Agriculture (5).

According to the recent book Revolución Agroecológica en Cuba by Peter 
Rosset et al., “CAC is an energizing methodology, it places the 
campesino and his/her family as protagonists of their own destiny; in 
contrast to classical extensionism- static and demobilizing of the 
campesino base-, based on the technician as transmitter of knowledge… it 
is based on horizontal transmission and the collective construction of 
knowledge, practices and methods. In other words, it tries to 
incorporate campesino tradition and innovation in order to add them to 
the results of scientific research in agroecology.” According to Rosset 
et al., “agroecology has achieved in little over ten years what the 
conventional model has never achieved in Cuba or anywhere: produce more 
with less (foreign exchange, inputs and investment”. (6)

According to ANAP president Orlando Lugo-Fonte, the most important 
factor in the success of agroecology in Cuba is “the Revolution, which 
gave us, and guaranteed us, property of the land; which developed us 
educationally, technically and socially; which inculcated in us the 
values of collectivism, cooperation and solidarity. But, above all, it 
dignified the men and women of the countryside and made them owners and 
made them responsible for much more than their parcel. It has made women 
and men conscious of their responsibility: feeding the people and 
protecting the environment, so that future generations of Cubans can 
also eat and have a clean and healthy countryside in which to live.”

“Thanks to all its revolutionary history, which dates back to the XIX 
century, the Cuban peasantry has accumulated very many experiences”, 
says Brazil’s João Pedro Stédile, one of the leaders of his country’s 
Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). “Apart from having gone through the 
green revolution, it has maintained its people’s revolution alive and 
has for fifty years been resisting against all aggressions of 
imperialism. For this, it is today the campesino sector that’s most 
ideologically and scientifically prepared to help us all campesinos and 
campesinas of the world to deal with the challenges imposed by capital”. (7)

But observers should not romanticize or idealize Cuba’s reality. 
Agroecology in Cuba faces serious challenges and contradictions (8). The 
government does not intend to do away with conventional industrial 
farming, and it is pushing ahead with the development of genetically 
modified crops (9), something that Funes and other Cuban agroecologists 
have vocally opposed (10). Some in the top levels of the Communist Party 
view agroecology as no more than a temporary band aid, to be discarded 
once the Special Period ends. But Funes, Vásquez and many other Cuban 
farmers are convinced that agroecology is the way to go today and will 
also be the way to go tomorrow. In the words of Funes, “Let’s do organic 
farming now, not out of necessity but rather with the conviction that it 
really is the path to take”.

/*Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero* is a Puerto Rican author, environmental educator 
and investigative journalist. He is a research associate at the 
Institute for Social Ecology and director of the Puerto Rico Project on 
Biosafety. His Twitter feed is @carmeloruiz/

1) Orlando Lugo-Fonte. Taken from the prologue to Revolución 
Agroecológica en Cuba: El Movimiento Campesino a Campesino de la ANAP en 
Cuba. B.M. Sosa, A.M. Roque Jaime, D.R. Avila Lozano y P.M. Rosset. 
First edition published in Cuba in 2010.

2) Funes et al. “Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming 
Food Production in Cuba” Food First Books 
http://www.foodfirst.org/store/book/Sustainable_Agriculture_and_Resistance; 
Ben Block. “Traditional Farmer Knowledge Leads Cuba to Organic 
Revolution” Worldwatch Institute http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6435; 
“The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” 
http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php, You can see the whole 
documentary in: http://vimeo.com/8653921

3) SOCLA PhD program blog http://doctoradoagroecoudea.wordpress.com/

4) Fernando Funes-Monzote. “La agricultura cubana en camino a la 
sostenibilidad”. LEISA magazine, July 2001.

5) http://www.foodfirst.org/store/book/Campesino_a_Campesino

6) Revolución Agroecológica en Cuba: El Movimiento Campesino a Campesino 
de la ANAP en Cuba. B.M. Sosa, A.M. Roque Jaime, D.R. Avila Lozano and 
P.M. Rosset. First edition published in Cuba in 2010.

7) João Pedro Stédile. Taken from his prologue for Revolución 
Agroecológica en Cuba: El Movimiento Campesino a Campesino de la ANAP en 
Cuba. B.M. Sosa, A.M. Roque Jaime, D.R. Avila Lozano and P.M. Rosset.

8) Miguel Altieri and Fernando Funes Monzote “The paradox of Cuban 
agriculture” Monthly Review, January 2012 
http://monthlyreview.org/2012/01/01/the-paradox-of-cuban-agriculture

9) Information resources on genetically modified crops in Cuba compiled 
by the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety. 
http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/search/label/Cuba

10) “Transgénicos: ¿Qué se gana? ¿Qué se pierde? Textos para un debate 
en Cuba” Texts compiled by Fernando Funes Monzote and Eduardo Francisco 
Freyre Roach

http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2451

-- 
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