Vol. 73/No. 5 February 9, 2009
Between January and September, working people and their revolutionary government began implementing a number of measures to increase food production and reduce imports, which account for some 60 percent of the food consumed on the island.
In the closing months of the year, three devastating hurricanes struck the island, Gustav and Ike in late August and early September, followed in November by Paloma, which hit the eastern provinces. Since then, with more than 90,000 totally destroyed homes still to be rebuilt and continuing food shortages, all efforts have been bent to making the most rapid recovery possible.
More than $10 billion in damage was inflicted by the three storms. The destruction compounded the economic consequences of soaring costs for food imports during the first half of the year, combined with plummeting world market prices for nickel, which today is Cuba’s main source of hard currency income.
Economy Minister José Luis Rodríguez reported to Cuba’s National Assembly in late December that annual economic growth for 2008 was 4.3 percent, half the 8 percent growth projected 12 months earlier. The year, he said, was one of the toughest the country has faced economically since the early 1990s, following the collapse of the USSR and the loss of some 85 percent of Cuba’s international trade agreements. It is expected that 2009 will be even more difficult.
Major steps by government
In the first months of 2008 the government took a number of steps to increase food production. These included:
In the never-ending attempt to “discover” and foster political differences between former Cuban president Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who was elected president in February, bourgeois government spokespeople and media commentators around the world have generally attributed the adoption of these and other measures to Raúl’s supposedly more “pragmatic” openness to introducing capitalist market relations. News articles have portrayed the steps taken over the past year as a reversal of socialist policies advocated by Fidel.
In fact, the new measures have nothing to do with the capitalist rents and mortgages system, which for the overwhelming majority of small farmers around the world inevitably results in growing indebtedness and farm foreclosures. The steps had been long planned and would likely have been taken even sooner had Fidel Castro not been incapacitated by illness in July 2006.
The restructuring of the sugar agro-industry, initiated by the government in 2002 and explained by President Fidel Castro in a major address to sugar workers that year, was a precursor and precondition to the more recent steps. And, like the current measures, the restructuring of sugar production, which involved the closing of 90 of the country’s least productive sugar mills and reallocation of 3.4 million acres of land from sugarcane cultivation to diversified food production, was carried out in the interests of workers and farmers. It was one of the most sweeping measures in the history of the revolution.
(See “Restructuring an industry: when workers decide” in last week’s issue and articles in the Feb. 9 and 16, 2004, issues titled “Radical reorganization and cutback of Cuba’s sugar industry” and “Cutback, restructuring of sugar industry: Cuban workers explain how it affects them.”)
Challenges facing farmers
To learn more about the challenges of food production the recent measures were designed to address, Militant reporters joined Miguel Toledo, general secretary of the National Union of Sugar Workers (SNTA), and Enrique Fernández, a member of the SNTA secretariat responsible for international relations, on a visit to the Juan Abrantes UBPC (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production). It is an agricultural cooperative in the Madruga municipality of Havana province.
Until 2002 the Juan Abrantes cooperative was devoted exclusively to sugar production. Part of a larger state farm, it supplied cane to the now-closed Camilo Cienfuegos sugar mill in Santa Cruz del Norte. With the nationwide cutback and reorganization of that industry, the farm shifted to cattle raising for meat and dairy production, as well as to cultivation of root vegetables, fruit, and trees. Few of those who chose to join the workforce there had previous agricultural experience with anything but sugarcane.
Our visit in February 2008 coincided with the monthly workers assembly at the cooperative, which we were invited to join, listening in as they discussed the problems they were attempting to resolve. Workers expressed pride in what they have accomplished, while focusing on the continuing challenges of making the transition to their new jobs and increasing production.
While output has grown, Eugenio Pérez, the cooperative’s manager, reported, “We haven’t reached most of the goals in our economic plan.” The one exception he cited was meat production, which exceeded the year’s targets.
“We can’t be satisfied with surpassing last year’s totals,” said Dora Cairo, one of the workers who took the floor. “We should be achieving our current goals and making continual progress.”
Pérez said shortages of supplies and equipment they were counting on had been central to their failure to meet production goals. Lack of water for irrigation had set back the planting of crops, for example. “We still don’t have the pump we requested” from the ministry of sugar, noted Julio Ramón. The ministry centralizes and prioritizes expenditures on imports needed by cooperatives like Juan Abrantes that continue to produce some sugarcane.
Last year, as part of their efforts to save fuel, workers here built the housing for an electric pump to replace the old diesel turbine. Months later, they were still waiting for the transformer, and for workers from the state electrical company to assemble and connect it.
The economic warfare against Cuba waged by the U.S. government exacerbates the difficulties faced in replacing antiquated equipment and reducing fuel consumption. The lack of tires, spare parts, and telephone service all came up as part of the wide-ranging discussion at the assembly on inefficiencies that hamper productivity and increase costs. Pérez reported that the cooperative consumes 10 liters of fuel a day just to deliver produce to the nearby village of Aguacate using a gas-guzzling tractor.
In addition, there is only one telephone for the entire community of more than 500 residents, with a limit of 400 minutes of monthly talk time. So workers burn even more fuel to travel to Bainoa, three miles away, for access to a second phone.
“We’re consuming precious fuel at a time of rising prices,” Pérez said. “It’s obvious that it makes much more sense to bring a telephone to Juan Abrantes than to take the co-op to the phone!”
María Elena Rodríguez, a technician, reported that the farm lacks an adequate supply of insecticides and medicines to kill ticks and intestinal worms that reduce the yield of dairy cattle and leave beef cattle skinny and anemic. “We also need to build quarters for milking.”
“Quarters for milking is something we can address immediately,” Pérez replied. But many other problems raised are questions of national development priorities and allocation of resources that cannot be resolved directly by workers at the cooperative.
For example, the telephone technology in the area is obsolete, noted Heriberto Alfonso, general secretary of the sugar workers union in Havana province, who participated in the assembly. “It’s being replaced with digital equipment. But the priority right now is the bigger municipalities. Digital equipment has already been installed in the town of Madruga, and we expect it to arrive here soon.”
“We need wire to fence off grazing areas,” said Raudelio Galván, head of the dairy section. “But we know the problem—it has to be imported.”
Questions such as these have been debated across Cuba in wide-ranging discussions following a speech by President Raúl Castro in the central city of Camagüey on July 26, 2007. Raúl called for a critical evaluation of “everything we do … to change concepts and methods that were appropriate at one point but have been bypassed by life itself.”
Following Castro’s speech, some 5,000 workplace assemblies were organized across the island, Toledo told the Militant. Problems affecting working people nationwide were discussed, such as income differentials, unequal access to hard currency, inadequate public transportation, shortages and poor training of teachers, and the decline in the number of family physicians. The assemblies also took up local questions such as incompetent managers and expensive services. Militant reporters found that such questions continue to figure highly in discussions across the island over the last year and a half.
“It’s through frank discussion that we can make progress,” said Toledo in remarks at the end of the workers assembly at Juan Abrantes, encouraging the kind of exchange that had just taken place. “You have to be critical. That’s the way to advance.”
Progress in milk production
One area where the most progress has been registered at the Juan Abrantes cooperative over the past year is milk production—a priority task nationwide.
The Cuban government guarantees a daily liter of milk for each child under seven. Adults with special dietary needs, including the elderly and women who are pregnant or nursing, are also guaranteed milk, and the government is working to expand the supply available to the general population.
Through the 1980s, Cuba was producing about 900 million liters of milk annually, Raúl Castro noted in his 2007 Camagüey speech. With the onset of the Special Period in the early 1990s—the economic crisis precipitated by the abrupt loss of import and export markets following the implosion of the Soviet bloc—milk production plummeted.
To meet the needs of the population, the government has imported powdered milk. As with foodstuffs in general, however, its price has climbed sharply.
Castro calculated that if domestic production did not continue to increase throughout 2008, then, based on July 2007 prices, Cuba would have to spend on milk imports alone more than three times what was laid out in 2004.
The Cuban president also pointed to the “absurd procedures” whereby domestically produced milk was being transported “hundreds of miles before reaching consumers who in many cases live just a few hundred meters from the dairy farm itself.” One consequence was an excessive use of diesel at a time of high fuel prices.
In 2008 domestic milk production rose 16 percent over the previous year, Osvaldo Martínez, head of the National Assembly’s commission for economic affairs, informed the Assembly in late December. The Cuban News Agency reports that locally produced milk is now being sold in 89 of Cuba’s 169 municipalities.
Cuba’s national cattle herd was halved during the worst years of the Special Period from a peak of 10 million head in the 1980s. Most starved to death, a result of the acute shortage of feed and fertilizer. There was widespread rustling and illegal slaughter of cattle for food.
The members of the Juan Abrantes UBPC are among those working hard to meet the challenge of reversing this decline.
“We started with 16 head of cattle in 2006. We’ve bought 190 since then and now, with breeding, the herd is at 635,” reported Eugenio Pérez with evident pride. “And all this has been achieved by former cane-growers.”
“We’ve been learning in the school of hard knocks,” Galván, head of the dairy section of the cooperative, told the Cuban newspaper Trabajadores. Fourteen workers currently tend 400 cows. “We have sufficient good grazing land for significantly increasing the herd” and dairy output, and workers have made big strides in clearing the land of a thorny bush called marabú, Galván noted. But realizing the full potential involves shifting to artificial insemination and mechanized milking, which require greater investment.
Agricultural diversification
Workers at the Juan Abrantes cooperative produce a wide variety of foodstuffs, from peanuts to plantains, squash, and boniato, a sweet potato. As it does with the milk, the cooperative supplies both the local community and Cuba’s broader food distribution network.
Workers are particularly proud of the pineapple production. “Pineapples are nutritious—they serve an important need,” said Amado Brito, head of agricultural production on the cooperative. “And they fetch a good price.”
But growing them entails back-breaking work. One of the measures Cuba’s revolutionary leadership took to boost production was establishing a results-based payment system that increases wages for workers engaged in the most demanding physical labor. Through this system, those who work in the pineapple fields on the Juan Abrantes farm receive about 3,000 Cuban pesos a month. The dairy workers earn 1,200-1,300 pesos, and other workers on the farm receive 600-700. Average pay in Cuba is around 400 pesos a month.
Members of the administrative staff at Juan Abrantes, who are not eligible for production bonuses, receive 480 pesos per month. Nine members of the co-op are not involved in production, including five members of the leadership council. Through discussions at their assemblies, workers there have decided to increase the wages of the administrators so they receive the average wage of the co-op’s members.
Basic Units of Cooperative Production
The Juan Abrantes is a particular kind of cooperative known as a Basic Unit of Cooperative Production. The UBPCs were formed in 1993 out of what used to be state farms. Unlike workers on state farms, however, members of the UBPCs own their own harvest and sell it either to the state at government-set prices, to local schools and hospitals, maternity clinics and child-care centers, or directly to the population. The workers receive wages linked to production results. They receive a daily minimum wage supplemented through their individual share in the surplus they collectively generate.
The land remains nationalized. As with other land in Cuba, it cannot be sold, rented, or used as collateral for loans. As a result, in contrast with what happened in prerevolutionary Cuba or what happens today to debt-burdened farmers in capitalist countries, farmers cannot be subjected to foreclosure or eviction. They cannot lose use of their land.
The establishment of the UBPCs through the breakup and reorganization of state farms some 15 years ago was made necessary by the harmful consequences of economic planning and management policies copied from the regime in the Soviet Union. These policies had fostered the growth of a massive bureaucracy. It was not unheard of, for example, for a state farm to have more personnel in administrative positions than workers in production. The elimination of this bloated social layer and other changes opened up the possibility for workers and farmers themselves to establish greater control over the production of food and other crops.
But the difficult economic conditions at the depth of the Special Period, when these cooperatives were launched, and depressed sugar prices on the world market, limited the gains that were made in confronting the crisis facing Cuban agriculture.
An agricultural development program established in 2007 brought benefits to UBPCs in Havana province, according to Julio Gómez, a provincial leader of the Communist Party, quoted in the April 30, 2008, Granma. Irrigation and access to fertilizer, pesticides, and other inputs improved.
But major problems remain, Gómez said. Of the 132 UBPCs in the province, 58 do not cover their production costs. Nationally, that is true for more than half of these cooperatives.
Juan Abrantes is one of the more efficient UBPCs in Havana province. “As with all such matters, this is a leadership question,” Toledo said. Because of the progress there, it has been attracting new members in recent years. The workforce was 40 in 2002, when reorganization of the sugar agro-industry began. Today it is 153.
At the same time, many UPBCs have either been consolidated with other co-ops or dissolved.
The workers at Juan Abrantes continue to be members of the sugar workers union. When we asked a group of members of the cooperative whether they considered themselves workers or farmers, they emphatically replied, “We are workers!”
Thirty-eight of the 153 members are women. Women make up 60 percent of the members of the co-op’s leadership council and both the secretary of the union and secretary of the Cuban Communist Party unit there are women.
“This reflects the leading role played by women members of the union nationally,” Toledo remarked. “Women make up 21 percent of the union’s membership but 32 percent of its leadership. Two of the six members of the national secretariat are women.”
Together, the UBPCs and state farms account for 65 percent of land farmed in Cuba but only 35 percent of agricultural production.
Small farmers are more productive. Tilling about one-third of the country’s arable land, they account for more than half of agricultural production.
The amount of land under cultivation in Cuba dropped by 33 percent between 1998 and 2007, President Raúl Castro told the National Assembly last July. The new land distribution measures aim to slow and reverse this trend by expanding the numbers of small farmers and the acreage they till, while the leadership addresses the more difficult challenge of making the UBPCs the major source of foodstuffs in Cuba.
The 2008 hurricane damage had a serious impact on the pace of realizing these objectives. Pinar del Río and the Isle of Youth in the west—historically on hurricane paths—were particularly devastated. In the east, Holguín and Las Tunas, which were less prepared for the damage they encountered, were also very seriously hit.
A nationwide rebuilding effort is under way, including housing repair and construction, cleanup, and mobilizations of voluntary work in agriculture. Within four months, 22 percent of the half-million damaged houses were repaired.
Despite the combined effects of the hurricanes, the ongoing consequences of the U.S. embargo, and the acceleration of the world capitalist economic contraction, agricultural production grew 1.6 percent in 2008, economy minister José Luis Rodríguez, told the National Assembly in December.
As these efforts continue, the experiences of workers like those at the Juan Abrantes UBPC and the lessons they have learned will be part of the broad national discussion preparing the next congress of the Communist Party, scheduled for the end of 2009.
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