Ricardo A. Puerta, Avanced Trading Corporation and José Alvarez, University of Florida
[1] The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for the grant provided to the International Agricultural Trade and Policy Center of the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida. Special thanks to Bill Messina for his thorough review of an early draft of the manuscript. All usual caveats apply.
[2] Although a survey of such prolific literature is beyond the scope of this paper, the interested reader is referred to Rodríguez (1987) for an analysis of the socio-economic impact of agricultural reforms on the Cuban peasantry, to Rodríguez (1990) for a thorough analysis of Cuba's development policies, to Aranda (1968) for an in-depth analysis of the Cuban agrarian revolution, and to García (1992) for a description of the current organization of Cuba's agricultural sector. Specific studies can be found in many issues of the Cuban journals Cuba Socialista and Economía y Desarrollo.
[3] The recent joint ventures between the Cuban government and foreign capital on the island are different because Cuba's share is owned by the State and not by private entrepreneurs. Furthermore, nationals provide only labor to these endeavors.
[4] Although Rodríguez (1987), Figueroa and García (1988), Forster (1989), Deere et al. (1992), and Deere and Meurs (1992) have shed light on some of these issues, their studies were conducted within different frameworks and covered specific periods of time. According to sources now living in exile, similar questions have been addressed in Cuba by many agricultural professionals and ANAP leaders in private meetings and unpublished studies since the late 1960s.
5 Recent market-oriented economic policies have been more successful in developing countries with centralized economies such as China and Viet Nam. The basic reform in these countries rested in the legalization of private property and private enterprises. In the case of China the eradication of agricultural communes was of special relevance. The new private sector has responded fast and vigorously and has contributed to an impressive increase in production (PNUD, 1993, p. 53).
[6] Rodríguez (1987, pp. 27-28) contains a summary description of the evolution of Cuba's changing agricultural policies from 1959 until the present. More thorough descriptions can be found in Aranda (1968) and in the two famous and polemic accounts of Dumont (1964; 1971).
[7] Armando Hart, a member of the Cuban Communist Party's Politburo, reiterated that policy in a 1969 public speech when he stated that "the goal of the Cuban revolutionary leadership is the total eradication of private property in the countryside" (Dumont, 1971, p. 145).
[8] Latifundia was defined as estates larger than 405 ha. According to Thomas (1971, p. 1217), many eastern European reforms of the 1920s went further than the Cuban ideas of 1959. For example, the maximum amount of land allowed in Poland and Bulgaria was between 20 ha and 49 ha, respectively. This comparison does not account for population density, which will be addressed in a later section of this paper, with respect to neighboring countries.
[9] Aranda (1968, p. 165) states that ANAP's assignments go beyond production matters because it fulfills important ideological orientation, cultural, and social tasks.
[10] Peasant guerrillas operated in the early 1960s in the mountains of the Escambray in Cuba's central region. For information on that campaign, the interested reader is referred to Clark (1990, pp. 47, 614 (n. 41), 615 (n. 42)).
[11] The following quote from Castro's closing speech at the second annual meeting of production cooperatives that Mesa-Lago (1988) cites from Granma Weekly Review is very revealing:
There are still a few tens of thousands of [private] farmers left. Working with them is much more difficult [than with concentrated cooperatives], it is terrible, virtually insolvable because one must discuss and make plans with tens of thousands of them... The day is not too far off... when we can say that 100 percent of [private] farmers are in cooperatives... We are waging a battle against [them] (p. 63).
[12] This fact is obvious to those familiar with the composition of the Cuban exile community. Thomas estimated that, at the end of the 1950s, there seem to have been some 200,000 families of Cuban peasants (1971, p. 1108). If immediate and extended family members were included, the figure would surpass the total of approximately one million Cuban exiles. "Compared with the Cuban population as a whole (according to the 1953 population census), the refugee community in the United States in the late 1960s was... under-represented by... agricultural workers..." (Blutstein, et. al., 1971, p. 64). The situation has not changed afterwards.
[13] A different interpretation for the late 1970s can be found in Deere et al. (1992). Although they claim that "the Cuban experience with collectivization is notable for its relatively voluntary and successful nature" (p. 141), they recognize that, "while state support is also crucial, the Cuban case illustrates how too much control can lessen cooperative autonomy and thus the attractiveness of this form of production to the peasantry" (p. 115).
[14] The idea that peasants are passive and non-modern people has been proven wrong in the scientific literature many times over. For example, Shanin (1979) contains numerous case studies on peasant societies written by social scientists from around the world.
However, this backward interpretation of the peasantry is still held by many today.
[15] Interested readers are referred to Puerta and Alvarez (1993) for summary descriptions of official collectivization mechanisms in Cuban agriculture (Table A1), main characteristics of cooperatives in a system of centralized economic planning (Table A2), and surviving mechanisms (deviations) of farmers in Cuban agriculture (Table A3).
[16] In fact, after more than 30 years of State intervention, Cuba shows results similar to those of neighboring countries of lower and higher population densities in Central America (Puerta and Alvarez, 1993, p. 10). Deere (1992, p. 45) states that Cuba's cultivable land per capita is on the order of 0.5 ha per person, significantly above the world average of 0.3 ha.
[17] These two sectors reflect the doctrinal preference of the Cuban leadership for collective farms (State control) over cooperative farms (social or community control) or privatization of the agricultural means of production. As stated above, that preference appeared in the early 1960s and is not based on actual performance by types of enterprises but on purely ideological grounds (Dumont, 1971, pp. 29-31, 50-51).
[18] The socialist-private sector distinction clusters CPAs with State farms for privileging them over other forms of production. The Cuban government's argument is that CPAs are "superior forms of collective production" when compared with the CCSs' "primary organizations" and with the non-cooperative or dispersed farmers who are "chaotic and anarchic" in their production.
[19] Aranda (1968) reports the results of the July 1965 census that found around 2.7 million ha in the 200,000 farms of what he calls "the private sector". The labor force in this sector included 290,000 men and women producers and their family members and an additional 36,000 permanent workers plus additional seasonal workers (pp. 147-148). The numbers, however, have changed since that time. CPAs were established 10 years after that census and their members are now part of the socialist sector. On the other hand, the number of peasants with small parcels (conucos) producing for family consumption, bartering or sales in the black market is not known. Deere et al. (1993) acknowledge that the 1987 first census of "private" sector land revealed that "the amount of land held by the non-peasant sector was not insignificant and that it had been previously underestimated in official data" (p. 9).
[20] The year 1973 has been used as the base because land use statistics in the Anuario for the 1960s seem to be unreliable. For example, a well known Cuban scholar (Rodríguez, 1987, p. 26) cites a total farm area of 8.5 million ha in 1959 from INRA-Legal Department rather than the 3.7 million ha in 1962 reported in the 1976 and 1977 Anuarios consulted by the authors.
[21] To what extent the farmers in the dairy development project of the Jimaguayú basin of the province of Camagüey described in the documents are representatives of the whole peasant population in Cuba is unknown to the authors. However, it is not unreasonable to assume similar conditions for CCS and dispersed farmers in the rest of the country as described by several foreign and Cuban researchers. Furthermore, our analysis will prove that to be the case with sugarcane producers for which data are available.
[22] Deere et al. (1992) explain that, "since the late 1970s, individual sugarcane farmers and CPAs in this sector are grouped together with state farms in what are known as Complejos Agroindustriales Azucareros (CAIs). Functionally linked to a sugarcane central, the state enterprise management is responsible for providing inputs and equipment required for sugarcane production by the private sector" (p. 144).
[23] Deere et al. (1992, pp. 123, 125) contain further proof concerning the level of new investments on irrigation systems and mechanization, in addition to access to credit and better lands mentioned earlier.
[24] The term viandas includes yuca (cassava), papa (potato), boniato (sweet potato), malanga (taro), plátano (plantain), and calabaza (pumpkin).
[25] The acopio quota is not included at the beginning of the scale because, rather than being a "preference", it is the only means that guarantees farmers' limited access to inputs.
[26] According to Cuban agricultural technicians and professionals now living in exile, State sector production is also deviated from acopio centers. However, these quantities are insignificant when compared with volumes in the non-State sector.
[27] Forster (1989) summarizes the chronology of this issue in the following manner:
...It is impossible to know precisely what portion of private output is siphoned off through those outlets. During the early years of the revolution, Dumont estimated (in 1963) that the acopio collected scarcely 70 percent of the country's corn, 59 percent of the tomatoes, 50 percent of the eggs, 40 percent of the beans, 38 percent of the poultry, and 18 percent of the malanga (taro). Domínguez estimates that in 1967 the acopio of private farm produce ranged from 76 percent of some crops to only 27 percent of others, with most of the remainder sold privately to consumers.
During the 1970s, as black market activity declined (due in part to acopio prices more favorable to the farmer) and the private sector was more effectively integrated into the state collection system, the acopio has undoubtedly gathered a far larger proportion of private production than the earlier figures from Dumont and Domínguez suggest. However, it is likely that in areas near the large cities, private (non-acopio) sales are still quite substantial. My own conversations in 1978 and 1980 with farmers outside Havana, Pinar del Río, and Cienfuegos indicated that some of them were producing two to four times their acopio quotas with the rest going to private consumption, barter (with neighboring farms), or private sales (to urban consumers) (p. 242).
[28] Pérez-López (1991, pp. 31-32) argues that yield differences are much less significant when the data are examined at the provincial level. Although his analysis of three zafras in the provinces of La Habana, Matanzas and Villa Clara (where yields tend to be highest and where non-State farmers tend to be concentrated) seem to support that assertion, non-State yields in those provinces are still higher than State yields on the average and much higher in the remaining 10 provinces.
[29] Pepper, better green than red, has the lowest demand of all vegetables studied. It is not a staple consumed directly but rather a basic ingredient in a cooking sauce of Cuban cuisine.
[30] Although the following quote could portray an isolated event, it is very revealing: "On one state farm, for example, the administrator himself told us that for onions, their number two crop, the private farmers in the same area had 50 percent higher yields than the state farm" (Benjamin et al., 1986, p. 180).
[31] However, according to recent Cuban exiles with a rural background, rice has become a very popular crop in conucos for on-farm consumption. Rice is a Cuban staple with a yearly per capita consumption of 120 pounds before the revolution (Marrero, 1970, p. 189). Today, Cubans receive half of that amount through the official rationing system.
[32] Before the revolution, corn was grown in more than 65 percent of Cuban farms (Marrero, 1970, p. 189).
[33] The drastic drop in both State and non-State production in 1979-80 was due to a severe blight of Blue Mold (Stubbs, 1987, p. 53).
[34] For more information on the free farmers' markets, the interested reader is referred to Alonso (1992), Deere and Meurs (1992, pp. 829-836), Figueroa and García (1984); Rosenberg (1989; 1992), Benjamin et al. (1986, pp. 57-77), and Mesa-Lago (1988, pp. 69-72).
[35] "The only products excluded from the [MLC] were beef, tobacco, coffee and cocoa. (The state kept control over these commodities because their exports provided substantial convertible currency)" (Alonso, 1992, p. 174).
[36] Cuban authorities reiterated their preferential treatment for CPAs which were involved in MLC operations. Alonso explains:
Special consideration was granted [to CPAs] in obtaining prime location, logistical support and tax exemptions. CPAs were authorized to contract with the state transportation system to ship goods to market, thus receiving the benefit of low state shipping rates. This was a considerable advantage over private farmers (1992, p. 174).
[37] Alonso (1992) states that "the government had lost control of the FFM -they had developed their own set of rules and the farmers were learning to operate at the fringes of socialist legality" (p. 175).
[38] Benjamin et al. (1986, p. 174) describe an interesting dialogue with the elected officers of a cooperative:
Authors: Are state farms really superior to cooperatives?
Co-op member: Of course.
Authors: Are they better organized?
Co-op member: Oh, no.
Authors: Are they more efficient?
Co-op member: Definitely not.
Authors: Are they more profitable?
Co-op member: No way!
Authors: Then what makes them superior?
Co-op member: (shrug)
The authors later recognized that "nobody could tell us" (p. 187) the answer to the last question.
[39] Readers interested in Cuba's efforts in the area of low input sustainable agriculture are referred to Rosset and Benjamin (1993)