BY KAREN RAY
BOSTON - Some 70 people attended an April 26 panel discussion here on "Life in Cuba After the Collapse of the Soviet Union." This was the last of eight public panels organized as part of the Cuban Reality course at Roxbury Community College, which was co-sponsored by the July 26 Coalition on Cuba.

"Cuba remains a socialist country after the Soviet Union disappeared," said Miguel Nuņez, first secretary of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., as he opened the event. He said with the collapse in trade with the Soviet Union, Cuba "needed to find solutions to very serious and very painful problems."

Before 1991, about 85 percent of Cuba's trade was with the Soviet Union. After that year all trade had to be carried out using hard currency at world market prices, instead of the more equitable exchange that had been established between the two countries. This created extreme shortages of basic goods such as oil and food items. Cubans refer to this period as the "special period."

Mary-Alice Waters, editor of New International magazine and of the Pathfinder edition of The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara, and Richard Levins, a biologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and advisor to Cuba on sustainable agriculture, joined Nuņez on the panel.

"Cuba is living through the most difficult years since the beginning of the revolution," Waters reported. But "Cuba is less alone today than at anytime since the opening of the revolution," she said. The "source of Cuba's problems is capitalism not socialism."

Waters expanded on this by pointing to the world capitalist crisis and the devastating impact this has had on the working class and farmers of underdeveloped countries. What is happening in Mexico is increasingly the norm, she explained. The difference in Cuba is that there workers and farmers have their own government, which is a powerful tool for organizing to resolve the problems in the interest of working people.

Waters gave some graphic comparisons of the special period in Cuba today with the Great Depression of the 1930s in the United States. She noted that the gross national product fell 35 percent during the 1930s depression, while in Cuba over the last five years it has fallen 50 percent. Trade on the world market in the 1930s dropped by two-thirds; in Cuba it has fallen 75 percent in the special period.

Levins, who has been an agriculture advisor to Cuba for more than 30 years,, noted that the special period is creating "ecologists not only out of conviction but ecologists out of necessity" in Cuba.

"In this country agribusiness thinks about how to sell products that use oil to farmers and make a profit." In Cuba, Levins explained, the question is "what is the best use of the land when you take away the real-estate speculators." He said that for a long time there has been debate among farmers on how to best organize agricultural production.

Many methods used in Cuba were those mimicked from the Soviet Union and influenced by capitalist agriculture, including a heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and overuse of the land for cash crops. "The revolution doesn't guarantee against stupidity, only that no one will profit from stupidity," said Levins.

Today, with the shortages of oil and pesticides, new agricultural methods are being used, including more crop rotation, mixing of crops, and organic pest control.

Participants raised questions and comments following the main presentations.

Students in the Cuban Reality course are planning a trip to Cuba later this year to see the revolution first hand.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home