Closed societies with failing agricultural systems can sometimes fool sympathetic outsiders. In 1932 a New York Times correspondent won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles celebrating Stalin’s ruthless “collectivization” of agriculture, a policy that brought a collapse in production and starvation for several million Ukrainian peasants. Cuba’s recent street protests over food shortages are a far smaller tragedy, but they stand out as another failure for collective farming, the approach Fidel Castro borrowed from his Soviet patrons. Once again, naïve outsiders failed to see it coming.
When the Soviet Union imploded in 1989, Cuba lost access to highly subsidized imports of fuel and agricultural chemicals, leading to a 42 percent drop in per capita agricultural production between 1990 and 1994. In response, Cuba should have abandoned its state run economy, including its underperforming collective farming model, but instead it improvised with a retreat to pre-modern production methods. Farmers replaced tractors with oxen and hand hoes, fertilizers with animal manure, and chemical controls for pests with biological controls and intercropping.
Outsiders with romantic ideas about Cuba and artisanal farming tried to hail these improvisations as progress. One American food rights activist praised what he called the “rapid and successful” spread of “agroecology” methods on the island. An article in the socialist journal Monthly Review in 2012 claimed that Cuba had delivered the best food production performance in all of Latin America from 1996-2005...
...The official food production data reported by the UN itself tell quite a different story. These data show that several decades into its experiment with agroecology, Cuba has yet to produce as much food per person as it had in 1990, before the crisis began. In fact, in 2019 Cuba’s official net per capita food production index number was still 41 percent below the 1990 number....
...Cuba should have watched and learned from the more complete reforms embraced by China and Vietnam. After control over farm production and marketing was returned to private farm households in communist China in 1978, and then in communist Vietnam after 1988, the result was food abundance, economic growth—and not coincidentally, regime survival. By holding onto Soviet-inspired collective farming institutions, while experimenting with a return to pre-industrial farm technologies, the tone-deaf regime in Havana puts its own survival at risk.