Beyond the “special period”: land reform, supermarkets and the prospects for peasant-driven food sovereignty in post-socialist Cuba (2008–2017)

ABSTRACT

When Cuba’s trade-based food security strategy was threatened by the collapse of the socialist trading block in 1989–1991, the popular response of small and irregular farmers proved vital in providing a minimum food basket during the ensuing crisis. In 2008, a large-scale land reform sought to expand this development towards food sovereignty. We evaluate the reform impacts, finding that after an initial surge in 2009–2010, food production and land use have rebounded and stagnated at pre-reform levels. Peasant-led agricultural development is forestalled by inaccessibility of appropriate technologies, perceived land tenure insecurity, missing/deficient markets and competition from import-based supermarket chains.

RÉSUMÉ

Lorsque la stratégie de sécurité alimentaire cubaine – basée sur le commerce international – a été menacée par l’effondrement du bloc socialiste en 1989–1991, la réaction populaire des petits agriculteurs et des agriculteurs irréguliers s’est révélée essentielle pour assurer un panier alimentaire minimum pendant la crise qui a suivi. En 2008, une réforme agraire à grande échelle visait à étendre ce développement en vue de la souveraineté alimentaire. Nous évaluons les impacts de la réforme et constatons qu’après une poussée initiale en 2009–2010, la production alimentaire et l’utilisation des terres ont rebondi et stagné aux niveaux d’avant la réforme. La stratégie de développement agricole dirigé par les paysans est mise à mal par le manque d’accès à des technologies appropriées, la perception d’un régime foncier incertain, des marchés inexistants ou déficients, et la concurrence des chaînes de supermarchés vendant des produits importés.

KEYWORDS:

• Peasant farming
• food imports
• food sovereignty
• land reform
• nested market

Introduction

Since the country’s partial transition from a high-input, export-oriented industrial agriculture towards diversified food production for domestic markets, taking place at a time of economic crisis between 1993 and 2005, Cuba is frequently cited as an exemplary case in the literature on food sovereignty and small farm-friendly policies (Altieri et al. 1999; Rosset 1998; Wright 2012). Indeed, much of Cuba’s rural population has “re-peasantised” (Enriquez 2010; Page 2010), and domestic food markets display more elements of what van der Ploeg, Jingzhong, and Schneider (2012) have termed nested markets – local and regional commercial networks composed of a multitude of small businesses and embedded in a multifunctional conception of agriculture and food. Given this focus on Cuba as a “lighthouse case” with a government taking steps towards agroecology and re-peasantisation, standard techniques of food regime analysis (McMichael 2009) have not been applied to Cuba.

This “agroecological revolution” (Altieri and Toledo 2011), however, took place on less than one-fifth of Cuba’s farmland, while the remainder (much of it unused) was retained by state and collective farms. Given the limited reach of this smallholder-led initiative in food sovereignty¹, the country’s dependency on food imports remained stable at 40–50 per cent of calories and 55–65 per cent of protein consumed (García Álvarez 2003, 4). Consequently, expanding land access for peasant farmers appeared to be the principal limiting factor for continued growth in domestic production.

In July 2008, these expectations appeared to materialise when Raúl Castro’s government embarked on a land reform that doubled the area managed by independent peasant farms (Law Decree 259). We trace its impacts on land use, food production and import dependency over a ten-year period (2008–2017). In doing so, we ask how a crisis-induced extension of small-scale low-input agriculture, peasant agency and bottom-up nested markets can be fortified and stimulated during a period of economic recovery and whether pro-peasant land reform is the key factor.

The first section provides a short historical introduction to the changing agrarian and food security policies of the Communist Party (PCC) government since gaining power in 1959, and highlights the first push for domestic food production during the post-Soviet economic crisis (1991–2005). An overview of production, import/export and land use data since 1985 is presented in Tables A1 and A2 (Online Appendix). The second section then focuses on our study period (2008–2017) and evaluates why the far-reaching pro-peasant land reform under Law Degree 259 did not lead to a second period of transition to food sovereignty. In the final section, we argue that the counter-intuitive outcomes of this land reform and the position of peasant farming and nested markets during this period in general, must be seen in the context of Cuba’s particular post-socialist transition and the development of competing food systems.

Interviews, expert consultations and observations took place between August 2012 and February 2018. Some of these were organised as part of planned² engagements with the Agrarian University of Havana and the National Institute for Agricultural Sciences; others derive more broadly from our residency in Cuba during this period and personal contacts with researchers based at institutes throughout the country. Fifty-nine interviews with farmers, cooperative members and civil servants took place in two rural areas: 42 in Mayabeque and Artemisa provinces, one of the country’s most dynamic areas for their proximity to Havana’s diverse markets, and 17 in an inaccessible valley characterised by subsistence farming (in Pinar del Rio province). In urban Havana, we interviewed 52 participants in food value chains, including vendors in private, cooperative and military-run marketplaces, shopkeepers, black-market vendors, butchers, owners of private cafeterias (bistros serving the majority population) and paladares (more expensive restaurants geared towards tourists and the upper class), as well as workers and mid-level managers of military-owned corporations involved in the distribution and sale of imported foods and beverages. In each case, we sought a close-up understanding of the power relations and interests that are operationalised into political, regulatory and entrepreneurial shifts in agricultural, food and auxiliary (land, inputs, transport and machinery) markets. Given the extensive interconnections between formal, informal and illegal economies and practices, this often meant building trust through various visits and relying on snowball sampling to locate potential sources.

The first wave of transition (1993–2005): trade-based food security to peasant-led food sovereignty

After taking power in 1959, Fidel Castro’s “Rebel Army” embarked on a series of land reforms (1959–1963) that nationalised haciendas and agro-industrial complexes and integrated them into the Ministry of Agriculture’s planned economy. Though some attempts at import substitution were made in 1963–1967, Castro returned to an export-led development model in 1968. In a series of speeches, he explained that machinery, land, inputs and labour would be shifted to the quest to harvest 10 million tons of sugar by 1970 and use the revenue for capital formation in other sectors. Despite its original support base in the small and middle peasantry, the revolutionary leadership came to regard the flourishing of a planned, modern agro-industrial sector as the motor of economic growth and agrarian transformation. The 1970s and 1980s saw a gradual expansion and modernisation of the sugar sector, stimulated by large preferential export markets within the Soviet-led Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Public resources for agricultural development were almost exclusively channelled into state farms and land- and labour-pooling cooperatives (Cooperativas de Producción Agropecuaria – CPA), thereby encouraging the remaining peasantry to collectivise “voluntarily” (Deere and Pérez 1999). Though the small farms that existed before 1963 were not nationalised, their acreage dropped from 29 per cent of Cuba’s agricultural area at the end of 1963 to only 7 per cent in 1985 (ibid., 193). Many rural knowledges and landscapes were lost during the transition from peasant to farmworker, as were practices of household self-sufficiency. At the same time, an ambitious public distribution and rationing system assured that the fruits of trade-based food security reached every household.

As COMECON disintegrated in 1989–1991, dependency on the Ministry of Sugar as the indirect guarantor of food security proved to be fatal. During the ensuring crisis (termed by Fidel Castro as the “Special Period in Peace Time”) the sugar sector was affected from both ends: on the one hand, the plantation system faced shortages of agro-industrial inputs, diesel and spare parts for tractors, harvesters, railways and processing plants, decreasing production by 50 per cent. At the same time, the sugar prices achieved in international markets (as opposed to the bilateral trade agreements within COMECON) fell to near or even below the costs of production. Agricultural export values collapsed from nearly US$ 5 billion per year in the 1980s to less than US$ 1 billion in 1993 and between US$ 500 and 600 million throughout the 2000s.

Between 1989 and 1994, average calorie intake fell from 3100 to 1863 kcal/capita, with widespread malnutrition and micro-nutrient deficiencies (Garfield and Santana 1997). As a desperate popular response, the remaining peasant farms and workers on state farms turned to low-input (but also low-output-per-worker) techniques to produce staples (Altieri and Funes-Monzote 2012; Rosset et al. 2011). Given the threat of demonstrations, Castro introduced two far-reaching food system policy changes: first, to respond to the scarcity in trucks and fuel, food production was shifted into and around the cities through a temporary land access programme that gave small urban and peri-urban plots of unused land to 142,862 individuals between 1993 and 1998. Second, a series of market reforms dynamised the local commercialisation of staple foods, authorising direct sales, supply-and-demand farmers’ markets, as well as small greengrocers, butchers and food processors (Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López 2013).

These incentives for domestic small-scale production, as well as an increase in wheat, rice, bean and meat imports, improved the availability of staples between 1998 and 2005, thus solving a severe food crisis in a relatively short timeframe The productivity of Cuba’s agriculture on the whole, however, was not recovered (cf. Table A1).

By including the value generated from export crops and contrasting it with the value of food imports, it becomes clear that food security (let alone other subsidised sectors such as health care or education) was only achieved at the cost of new dependencies. During this period, tourism, remittances and medical services inherited sugar’s role as foreign exchange-earners. Since 2004, preferential trade agreements with Venezuela reached into most economic sectors and accounted for 40.3 per cent of all trade in the period 2010–2014. While this new bilateral friendship has allowed a gradual growth in the food import bill, it also marked a renewed commitment to trade-based food security (cf. Table A1, and remember the fluctuations of world market prices for some staples that occurred during this period). The fragility of this development path first became apparent in 2016–2017, when the accelerating economic crisis in Venezuela led to a curtailment of Cuba’s imports from petrol to inputs for the pharmaceutical industry.

Measuring import dependency in Cuba is conceptually difficult, owing to the differences between valuation processes in Cuba’s domestic economy and those applied in international trade. Under-valuation, however, occurs in both instances: in the preferential prices achieved for some food imports and in the below-market prices applied in the public procurement of a share of domestic production. In Table A1, the FAO data for value created at the farm-gate –supplied by Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) – is contrasted with the data on agricultural trade. This comparison indicates that between 2006 and 2014 the price tag of agricultural imports lay somewhat below the value of domestic agricultural production (73%–76%). If export crops are excluded, the value of food imports matched (93%–107%) the value of domestic production destined for domestic markets. This resonates with the value presented by García Álvarez and Anaya Cruz (2015, 166), who estimate that 50 per cent of the calories and 65 per cent of the protein consumed by Cuba’s population in 2014 were imported. Similar percentages are reported for the 1950s (47% and 53%), 1980s (50% and 55%) and 1994 (44% and 62%), while the estimate for 2001 (39% and 52%) was significantly lower (García Álvarez 2003, 4).

Only 11.2 per cent of the import bill is made up of foods based on crops not suitable for Cuba’s climate – primarily wheat and small volumes of malt, wine and olive oil (calculation based on ONEI 2017b). Fruits, vegetables, tubers and beef are not imported in significant volumes. Some authors (for example, Altieri and Toledo 2011; Ergas 2013; Wright 2012), however, commit an epistemological fallacy based on this data: based on the fact that products from these subsectors were not (or scarcely) imported by the state, which holds a legal monopoly on all import and export operations, they deduce that Cuba is already “self-sufficient” or even “food-sovereign” in these subsectors. This masks the existing popular demand for more variety, more consistent access and better quality, as well as the need to limit post-harvest losses.

Rosset et al. (2011) show that peasant farms and cooperatives were already responsible for 65 per cent of domestic food production in 2006. At the time, the 1.2 million hectares of sugar cane and other export crops (20 per cent of Cuba’s agricultural land) abandoned during the “Special Period” largely remained idle. Table A2 indicates that a significant land use shift from export to food crops did occur during the worst years of the crisis (1994–1999), taking place on state farms as well as the new peri-urban allotments. During the recovery (2000–2008), however, we see no large-scale shift in land use, but a 30 per cent decrease in cropland acreage overall. This period was marked by two developments: first, the realisation that under competition from producers in Brazil, the Cuban sugar sector would not be able to regain its strength as the country’s “breadwinner”, as production dropped from 3.6 million to 1.1 million tonnes, one-eighth of the 1988 harvest, and 102 of 156 sugar mills closed (González-Corso 2015). Second, the PCC renewed its ideological commitment to state-led development (Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López 2013), so that no idle land was allotted to private farms and many local supply-and-demand markets tolerated during the 1990s markets were closed. Between 1989 and 2007, total cultivated acreage decreased from 4.4 million to 3.0 million hectares (ONEI 2008), and the successful peasant sector only had access to 19 per cent of Cuba’s agricultural land (Table 1).

Table 1. Access to land by different actors in the agricultural system at the end of 2007 and 2016, respectively (in 1000 ha).

	Arable		Pastures		Total		Left idle
	2007	2016	2007	2016	2007	2016	2007	2016
State	692.3	521.9	1191.3	1390.1	1883.6	1912.0	627.2	644.3
UBPC	1190.0	840.4	880.1	688.1	2070.1	1528.5	465.4	331.8
CPA	305.2	267.3	215.3	235.7	520.5	503.0	73.4	78.0
Private farms	798.2	1091.1	350.8	1159.2	1149.0	2250.3	66.3	245.6
Total	2985.7	2720.7	2637.5	3473.1	5623.2	6193.8	1232.3	1299.8

Note: The highest values for each row are indicated in bold.

Source: Authors.

The 2008 land reform

After taking over the presidency from his brother, in 2006, Raúl Castro ushered in a series of economic reforms (2008–2014). The state divested from unprofitable sectors of the economy (including most agricultural sub-sectors) and focused its resources on dollar-earning activities that could effectively finance social services (Gamboa Costa, González Sousa, and Herrera Sorzano 2013, 12; Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López 2013). As part of this reform plan, the usufruct land access programme was continued after ten years of virtual standstill and expanded into a nation-wide land reform. The PCC leadership did not frame this reform as an affirmation of independent, small-scale production, but as a necessary step to bring idle land into production without using state resources. In 2007, the municipal MINAG (Agriculture Ministry) delegations had reported that a total of 1.23 million hectares lay idle on state and collective farms, much of it for 15 years.

The land reform law (Law Decree 259), published on 10 July 2008, created an administrative mechanism on the municipal level. It enabled the municipal MINAG delegations to identify plots of idle land and grant usufruct leases on parcels of up to 13.42 ha for renewable periods of five to ten years. Established farms could apply for additional parcels until holding 40.26 ha. During the following months, one of the largest pro-peasant land reforms in post-socialist countries took place (compare with Spoor 2012). According to the latest published figures, from August 2018, 241.604 usufructuarios (leaseholders) had received leases (Rodríguez Guerrero 2018). This would indicate that – including the allotments from the 1990s – a total of 384,457 small farms were formed under the “usufruct” mechanism since 1993. In a country of 5.1 million economically active individuals, 77 per cent of them living in urban settlements, these numbers represent a shift towards family-farm-based agriculture with few parallels.

This policy framework was confirmed by the VI PCC Congress in 2011 (Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López 2013) and expanded by Decree-Laws 300 and 311 (December 2012 and January 2014). These modifications extended the duration of usufruct contracts (up to 20 years for permanent crops), expanded the land ceiling to 67.10 ha for livestock farms and allowed the hiring of farmworkers and the construction of a family dwelling and other farm buildings on a section of up to 800m², which would be owned by the family. Until 2015, a total of 1.7 million hectares (30.2% of Cuba’s total agricultural area in 2007) had been granted to usufructuarios (Delgado di Silvestrelli and Ceballos 2015). In August 2018, the Ministry of Agriculture elevated the number to 2.1 million (Rodríguez Guerrero 2018). While data on the longevity of usufruct farms is not published, a March 2018 article in the PCC newspaper mentions that 31.8 per cent of the post-2008 beneficiaries, farming 37.4 per cent of the land, had not “remained in the programme” (Rendón Matienzo 2018). When taking this rate of abandonment into account, peasant-managed acreage still grew by 1.1 million hectares between 2007 and 2016 (Table 1).

Many observers, who had seen poor access to land as the principal limiting factor in the transition to smallholder-led food sovereignty (both in Cuba and beyond), expected the massive usufruct programme to induce a visible expansion of cultivated acreage, especially in domestic food crops (for example, Altieri and Toledo 2011, 601). This was also suggested by the first data from 2009 to 2010, which showed that up to 300,000 hectares were added to the overall production of staples for the domestic economy, an increase of 28 per cent (Table A3). In subsequent years, however, much of this land (as well as previous allotments to smallholders and cooperatives) was abandoned or “put on hold” as farmers felt the absence of further reforms to rural credit, input markets and regulations inhibiting how food could be sold and where it could be moved. The initial enthusiasm of many usufructuarios has not led to sustainable growth – for most staples the production levels reached before the reform, in the period between 2003 and 2008, and in some cases those reached in the enthusiastic first two years of the reform (2009 and 2010), are still benchmarks. Cultivated acreage has further decreased to 2.7 million hectares (from 4.4 million in 1989 and 3.0 million in 2007). We estimate that 80 per cent of the former sugar cane plots, many far from population centres and with poor access to markets, have either overgrown or were converted to extensive pastures with minimal productivity.

Further investigation is warranted on how much of these pastures (and idle land in general) can readily be taken back into production, considering the widespread infestation with invasive shrubs such as Dichrostachys cinerea (marabú). In 2000, 1.14 million hectares had been overgrown by the thorny plant (Cordero 2012), while a recent report (MINAG 2017) showed that, as of December 2016, 83 per cent of idle arable land (0.82 million ha) had been invaded, with no numbers given for pastures.

Besides the shift to extensive pastures, our research also indicates a substantial overestimation of productive land use and, consequently, more idle land than reported in official statistics. We found that the legal environment of periodically renewable usufruct contracts produces local power relations with complex outcomes. Municipal MINAG delegates are empowered to cancel contracts if they judge that a plot has been used inefficiently or in violation of cropping and public procurement regulations. Until May 2015, authorities had already cancelled over 43,000 usufruct contracts (around 20% at the time) for “incorrect use of the land” (Delgado di Silvestrelli and Ceballos 2015). Tenure insecurity faced by private and cooperative farms alike regularly leads them to report larger areas under cultivation so as to avoid sanctions or expropriation. When no crop is planted, farmers may rear some goats or cattle on the respective lot to limit overgrowth. Other usufructuarios plant fruit tree seedlings to increase tenure security for various years. Officials and farmers involved also referred to extra-legal solutions to this dilemma, including regular payments to local officials in exchange for warnings before inspections. One municipal MINAG director said she often “resolved” cases of possible expropriation by attesting to having seen animals graze the plot. In return, the farmer is expected to “resolve a problem of hers” (Gladys, 11 February 2016). In other cases, such reciprocal relationships between functionaries and farmers form when (or before) the latter apply for land in the first place, and are maintained throughout, given the periodicity of contracts. In one conversation we witnessed, the delegate requested that a land applicant provide a scarce medicine for her mother before the allotment could be discussed. As in other sectors of the economy, inspectors and local officials only receive a token wage (US$ 12–20) and are widely expected by all actors involved to live off of bribes and gifts. Farmers combine different strategies in order to hold on to their allotted land until (in the near or distant future) they can acquire the necessary means for more intensive land use. This strategy appears to mirror the experience in post-communist Romania and Ukraine (Varga 2019), where the majority of smallholdings created by broad agrarian reforms during the 1990s have not engaged in commercial farming.

While families who are “hanging on” to their allotments are most directly threatened by the regime of tenure insecurity, the most productive usufruct farms are also vulnerable. Several farmers told us that significant investments could make their land more valuable in the eyes of “interested parties”. Well-connected competitors could then use the vagueness of expropriation regulations and backdoor contacts with municipal and cooperative officials for their benefit. With a rise in sales, farmers thus often seek to build safeguards (reciprocal relationships) that may limit the precarity of their success.

Only some small farms are able to build farm patrimony over time– we use the term “patrimony” for the means of production on non-capitalist farms (see van der Ploeg 2013, 25–26). Low wages in most economic sectors (15–25 dollars per month for skilled workers and only slightly more for professionals) mean that most semi-proletarian farm households can hardly channel investments into their farm. Families that do engage in profitable off-farm activities or receive remittances or tips from tourism jobs, however, find that most intermediate farm implements and often even basic hand tools are impossible to locate. Scarcity of tools and inputs was mentioned as a limiting factor by all interviewees across the food chain. While larger agricultural enterprises have somewhat better access through the ministry’s internal channels, smaller collective farms face challenges similar to the usufructuarios. Lack of basic and intermediate tools, leading to low labour productivity (even when using agroecological techniques), is the main reason why the immense influx of labour into small farming – facilitated by the land reform – has not (yet) increased national food production. Difficulties in patrimony formation and access to appropriate technologies counterbalance the essentially free access to land. A secondary result of low labour productivity is that development on one farm almost inevitably relies on hiring farm labour from poorer neighbours. This process perpetuates and normalises the social cleavages that emerged during the “Special Period” (Espina 2008) and sets the stage for a differentiation into entrepreneurial farmers and a rural semi-proletariat.

When comparing the Cuban case to other post-socialist transitions, another factor of post-crisis growth is almost entirely missing: the diverse and extensively cultivated household plot attached to the rural home. In Russia, private household plots and dachas produced 31.8 per cent of agricultural output in 1992 and 41.5 per cent in 2008 (Spoor 2012; Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019, this issue), while Uzbekistan’s 2.45 million household plots with an average 1900 m² became crucial guardians of household food security in a time of rising inequality (Lerman, García-García, and Wichelns 1996; Veldwisch and Bock 2011). In Central and Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic, although household plots’ share in production is lower, a large share of households produce part of their own food on these plots (Jehlička, Daněk, and Vávra 2019, this issue). In Vietnam, small plots have been crucial for household resilience and the conservation of agricultural biodiversity (Trinh et al. 2003). While household plots have a history in some of Cuba’s collective farm structures, the 2008 reforms introduced a size limit of 320 m² (including the farmhouse) for existing rural homes, and 800 m² for urban houses, as well as new homes built on usufruct plots; or respectively 0.032 and 0.08 ha. All farmland beyond that size is state owned and must contribute to the state procurement system. This regulatory frame originally aimed at preventing the formation of a dual agricultural economy, in which resources from formal farms under state control are en masse stolen and used on intensively-managed but virtually untaxable household plots, the latter being not only vehicles for food security, but also market gardens producing a significant surplus (Shmelev 1979; Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019). While the outright legalisation of markets for farm land would inevitably lead to differentiation between farms, moderately raising the ceiling for private household plots to around 0.2 ha would not have this effect. Areas of this scale, legally attached to the family home, are well suited for intensive tropical home-gardens and small orchards.

A political economy of stagnation

Almost two decades after the collapse of Cuba’s industrial agricultural economy, the 2008 land reform marks the PCC’s recognition that state farms, sugar exports and planned distribution networks could not be revived. Its acceptance of small, private farms and food businesses as autonomous actors, however, remains limited. Beyond land access, the policy environment continues to enact the PCC’s traditional suspicions of private economic actors and spaces. It does so by subjecting these actors to a precarious set of capabilities, restrictions and (un-)certainties. At the same time, the economic basis of the PCC government has shifted considerably after the “Special Period”, and new priorities and power structures have formed. An analysis of the position of peasant farms and nested food markets in the post-2008 period thus remains incomplete if it does not situate the peasant farmer and his homologues along the food chain (namely, family-based processors, grocers and vendors with similar characteristics as peasant farms) within the broader trends and fissures in Cuba’s post-socialist political economy.

The second food system: import dependency and corporate interests

When studying agrarian changes that take place within market economies, including the transition economies of Eastern Europe, Central and East Asia, we tend to depart from an analysis of “food systems” or “food regimes” and the assumption of their interconnection with the respective country’s wider economy (for example, McMichael 2009). Such analysis yields the potential to connect empirical observations, such as changes in farming styles, with wider trends in capital accumulation, regulatory regimes, elite interests and discourses on what constitutes “good”, “modern”, as well as “alternative” agriculture. In doing so, this approach allows us to better understand the context to which potential transitions to more equitable and sustainable agricultures are subjected, and thus lay out paths for resistance. Studies on Cuban agriculture, however, have often followed the implicit assumption that Cuba’s state (and thus the actor which combines, to a large extent, the contradictory functions of production, import and export, market regulation, agricultural research and extension, setting of prices and the shaping of discourses) acts in a largely monolithic manner based on an agenda founded, first and foremost, on developmentalist and egalitarian premises. Cuba’s agrarian citizenship, the practice of peasant agriculture and the construction of alternative markets tend thus to be contextualised as processes that are “within the Revolution” and are deeply enmeshed with the actions, support and agenda(s) of the state. Unlike virtually everywhere else, so is the assumption, peasant agriculture, agroecology and local markets in Cuba are not spaces and paths of resistance to, and bottom-up transformation of, an economy dominated and regulated by elites with divergent priorities.

The literature on Cuba’s “agroecological revolution”, if re-read from a political economy perspective, misses that the new food system therein described – with trends towards food sovereignty, agroecology and decentralisation – is only one of several dynamics that emerged through the crisis and post-socialist transition. During the same period, a corporate complex with abundant PCC support has come to integrate the country’s import, distribution, industrial processing, supermarket and retail sectors, greatly expanding them in the process and thus forming a second food system. This state-capitalist form of a “corporate food system” was born out of the same necessities of the “Special Period”, yet its structure, interests and its sweeping growth after the crisis, both in economic terms and in its access to national policy-making and state resources, may have placed it in competition with the domestic food system.

Between 2006 and 2017, a series of mergers turned most of the powerful entrepreneurial state companies into subsidiaries of the military’s holding GAESA. As of 2018, this sprawling corporate network (led by Raúl Castro’s son-in-law, General Luis Alberto Rodriguez) includes all four supermarket and retail chains (TRD Caribe, Panamericana, Habaguanex and Caracol) with around 3000 stores throughout the country, the monopolies on food imports and container discharge, as well as the principal refrigeration and distribution companies. Formed during the 1990s (with minor antecedents in the late 1980s) to serve the luxury demands of diplomats and tourists, this alternative channel for the distribution and sale of (almost exclusively) imported goods was tasked with generating foreign exchange. In 1998, the stores opened to Cubans who held U.S. dollars from tips and remittances. In this context (recovery of foreign exchange from foreigners and privileged Cubans), these corporations initially aimed for a 140 per cent commercial margin (port-to-retail) to their sales (Benzing 2005, 70), which by 2017 had increased to 140–240 per cent (interviews with TRD managers, 14 and 27 November 2017, cf. Kingdom of Spain 2017). With the exception of a handful of products acquired from large state processing companies and joint ventures, GAESA’s logistics is geared towards Cuba’s three container terminals, especially the new multi-billion dollar Mariel terminal near Havana.

While the state benefits from GAESA’s activities through corporate and sales taxes, it has allowed these corporations to prosper and capitalise far beyond the growth rates experienced by other sectors during the recovery. Departing from the agricultural import bill in Table A1, and excluding animal feeds and the handful of items that are still imported for subsidised sale through the rationing system, we estimate the 2014 pre-tax revenue from imported food distributed through the corporate system and sold in its supermarkets at US$ 3–4 billion. Part (and perhaps also effect) of this rapid growth is that the corporate food system has largely replaced the subsidised distribution system for imported goods run by the Ministry of Interior Commerce (MINCIN). In December 2010, the government declared that the food subsidy system (at the time costing US$ 894 million) would be “gradually eliminated”; in the 2017 budget, subsidies had been reduced to US$ 156 million (Castro Morales 2017; Cubadebate 2010).

Domestic agricultural markets, on the other hand, had a reported retail-level revenue of US$ 3.27 billion in 2014 and US$ 3.38 billion in 2017 (ONEI 2015–2018), shared between state-run marketplaces (42% in 2017), private and cooperative marketplaces (15.4%) and individual grocers (42.6%). When including complementary channels such as barter, direct farmgate sales, sales to hotels and processing factories and the value of public procurement, we estimate that the revenue generated in the domestic food system exceeds US$ 5 billion.

Little is clear about how these two systems and their respective regulatory frames interrelate in the present. From the perspective of the government, their parallel trajectory has led to a situation in which most food imports earn a massive commercial margin, which (through taxation and transfers) provides funding for the state and its subsidised initiatives, while at the same time (through corporate profits) funding the initiatives of the emerging conglomerates and economic elites. In 2017, the entrepreneurial activities performed by state-owned companies were planned to contribute 91 per cent to the state budget through the taxation of their sales, services, utilities and labour, as well as through tariffs and transfers. Taxes on small-scale, independent economic activity represents but a nascent contribution to the budget, which is again mostly derived from the urban self-employed and tourism services (Castro Morales 2017). Taxation of small farmers, processors and vendors contributes little to the state budget, owing to low levels of taxation and the difficulty of enforcement. Hence, the initiatives of Havana’s principal elites (state and PCC bureaucrats, the military hierarchy, as well as corporate managers and their partners in international joint ventures) benefit from food imports, centralised distribution and supermarketisation,³ while scattered domestic production and decentralised markets are – through their very structure – outside of their reach. This represents a dilemma for policymakers and may act as a disincentive for further reforms that could benefit small domestic producers and their networks, as well as actively supporting such producers through the sale of appropriate technologies and inputs or the marketing of their products in supermarkets and hotels. Many of the self-employed farmers and vendors we interviewed mentioned this constellation of interests. Some framed it as a “dilemma” for policymakers or more generally as a “problem of underdevelopment”, reliance on tourism and the double economy. Others saw it more critically as a two-tiered system of access and complained that “foreign multinationals like Nestlé have more rights than Cubans trying to make a living” (Ricardo, 11–13 March 2017). Of the farmers and market vendors interviewed, 43 per cent voiced the belief that the vested interests of elites in centralised distribution networks were at least partly responsible for the slow allocation of new rights and capabilities to small farms and labour units.

Given their exemption from the many restrictions placed on private economic activities, the companies in the import/supermarket system continue to capitalise at a faster rate than their (much smaller) competitors in the domestic/peasant-led system. Supermarkets are being built or renovated, they receive investments in storage and transport capacities that far outweigh those employed to battle post-harvest losses in the domestic system, and the salaries, bonuses and company benefits of managers and workers rise. Two managers at TRD outlets in Havana told us that ongoing investments in the cold chain would allow them to finally offer more imported fruits, such as strawberries and grapes. Conserved tomatoes imported from Italy and beef patties from the U.S. are offered (and advertised) in shiny supermarkets, yet domestic tomatoes and meat are sold at markets cobbled together from old boards and metal sheets, lacking refrigeration facilities. Independent food processors have extremely limited access to appropriate technologies or inputs; for lack of packaging for conserves, a scarce supply of old rum and beer bottles is used. Domestic distributors rely primarily on seventy-year old trucks and private cars, while the corporate food system can rely on a modern truck fleet and diesel at subsidised prices, importing spare parts when needed through its own subsidiaries.

These accelerating differences in resource access already had an effect on food quality and customer choices during our study period. In many ways, the proliferation and swift capitalisation of GAESA’s outlets resembles the effects of “supermarketisation” in other developing countries (Reardon and Minten 2011). A particular concern in Cuba is their potential to bypass or outcompete small domestic producers and local markets. Supermarkets also set new aspirations in a food culture that has long been plagued by scarcity of ingredients. Many Cubans have begun to idolise imported, industrial foods and brands produced by multinationals such as Nestlé, SPAR or Pernod Ricard, and sold by TRD or Panamericana, a development that could counteract the potential for a further transition to food sovereignty. Some of these multinationals have signed far-reaching contracts with GAESA companies that see their brands imported preferentially and allow their domestic joint-ventures near-monopolies in markets such as bottled water and ice-cream (Nestlé) or soft drinks and beer (ABInbev). They also include the exclusive export and international marketing rights for Cuba’s principal high-value food products, such as rum and juices (ABInbev), as well as cigars (Imperial Tobacco). These and other post-communist monopolies are sustained by the communist-period restrictions and bans on small private activity that remain in place for all other Cubans.

Precarity and initiative in domestic food markets

Observers of the “agroecological revolution” that jumpstarted domestic food production in 1993–2005 analysed this phenomenon as a “massive popular response of residents themselves to the food shortages” and the implosion of industries (Altieri et al. 1999, 132). Since the mid-2000s, however, Cuban families have tried – more or less successfully – to leave the “Special Period” behind and successively overcome extreme poverty, malnutrition and lack of opportunities. It is important that we recognise that, in doing so, they also overcome the reasons that led to their engagement in low-input food production in the first place. This process was still ongoing during our study period, as salaries remained low (averaging US$ 27.48 per month in 2015) and living standards remained below 1980s levels. Very few Cubans have access to jobs or capital in lucrative sectors such as tourism or personal transport, and the private economy remained restricted to few professions, as well as the insecure black market.

We argue that the dynamic towards food sovereignty, which commenced as “crisis farming” in the 1990s and 2000s and continued in the attempts of land reform usufructuarios to make a basic living from agriculture, is sustainable only in so far as it develops from the minimal objectives of survival/household reproduction towards an incremental rise in labour productivity and small farm prosperity. While a minority of producers have been able to make such a shift, the majority was either “holding on to the land” until conditions improve or had already abandoned their farms. In Havana, most of the smaller urban gardens opened during the 1990s have now closed, yet some of the larger peri-urban farms have remained lucrative, indicating a trend of consolidation.

Where volumes grow, however, the difficulty of finding legal bulk marketing channels (besides state procurement at low prices) is a limiting factor. Wholesale markets are necessary in all provincial capitals. Only one such license was ever given, in 2013, to a group of former regional MINCIN administrators in Havana. They founded a short-lived market called “El Trigal”, located 13 kilometres south of the city centre, where farmers, cooperative agents and other intermediaries could sell larger quantities in a legal, secure setting. Being the only market of its kind, “El Trigal” overpriced its services and was closed in May 2016 after unspecified “irregularities” occurred in its operation (García Álvarez and González Águila 2016). In the absence of wholesale channels, regional market development relies on individual initiative based on personal networks and the ability to gain access to state-owned transport resources or permits for inter-provincial transport. Farmers who lack such networks depend on intermediaries, who are thus able to organise value chains in their favour, often doubling or tripling prices between the farmgate and urban markets only 50 kilometres away. Permits for each individual food transport across provincial borders are still required today and issued only when all parties in a trade can document that they have met state quotas, paid taxes and acquired the necessary licenses, which change frequently and require time, money and connections to maintain. Some intermediaries have cultivated relationships with the highway police stationed at control points along inter-provincial borders. Even in the outskirts of Havana (belonging to the provinces of Artemisa and Mayabeque), these uncertainties in advance-planning how to bring harvests to market is mentioned when farmers explain why they do not extend production.

Some farmers’ cooperatives have designated agents who pool and market members’ produce, while others maintain stable links with specific private grocers and market vendors. In many cases, however, rural cooperatives lack the means to effectively assist members in bringing diverse harvests to market, or these means are unavailable due to spontaneous privatisation. Funes-Monzote proposes that the inefficiencies in territorial cooperatives (which each hold “dominion” over agricultural activities in a specific area) could be overcome by the farmer-led establishment of voluntary, specialised marketing cooperatives (personal communication, 8 December 2014). By legalising specialisation and competition between cooperatives, farmers themselves could close the missing commercial rural-urban links in a way that limits inequalities of access and an accumulation of market power in the hands of intermediaries.

At the current rates, emigration continues to hold a significant potential to disrupt the formation of networks and patrimony in the domestic/peasant-led food system. Before the U.S. ended the privileged treatment of illegal immigrants from Cuba in January 2017, some of our interviewees saw the more dynamic agricultural sub-sectors, such as peri-urban pork production and marketing, as “stepping-stones” for emigration: semi-legal spaces “where you can quickly earn the $10,000 for the coyotes (human traffickers) who get you North” (interviews with butchers and meat distributors in November–December 2016). Indeed, one sow, if seen as a reproducible asset of a family’s patrimony, can bring in more money than a career in a professional sector, while only minimal resources (such as access to a private car with a trunk) are required to market it. Similarly, the profits from lucrative farms, post-harvest and processing operations are often used for ventures in other sectors of the economy, particularly in gastronomy, tourist accommodation and personal transport.

Since 2012, some cooperatives and collectives have been permitted to sign direct sales contracts with foreign-operated hotels and restaurants (Martín González 2013). Similar to the remuneration of Cuban workers in joint ventures, however, payment is through a MINTUR financial entity – in this case FINTUR S.A. Though this bank bills the joint venture in dollar-equivalent currency (CUC), it pays the Cuban workers or suppliers in Cuban pesos, using a fictitious exchange rate of 1–10 – the official exchange rate is 1–24, meaning that 58.3 per cent of the value is retained (Amuchástegui 2014, 180). In similar arrangements, some food processing plants, operated by state or joint venture corporations, have established contract farming systems for products such as tomatoes, guava and mango in the municipalities surrounding their plants. Some better-equipped, entrepreneurial farmers specialise in the production of onions to make use of rising public procurement prices for the product. What all these marketing channels have in common is that they create opportunities to sell high-value products in bulk at the farmgate, allowing the included farmers to bypass the fragmented, often informal or illegal markets for their products. Micro-investments in appropriate technologies, where available, have kickstarted local value-adding, as is the case in the dozens of family-run charcuterías (butcheries that offer processed meat products) that opened in Havana after licenses for this trade were first granted in 2015 (interviews with owners, 11 and 14 December 2016).

Such micro-investments, however, pale against the agency of the Cuban state. While Cuba’s two food systems are largely segregated in space, and different social groups participate in them, the central state governs both, gears investment to one or the other and may favour one or the other in sectoral policies. Further examination of the state’s institutional interests, from taxation through food security, must complement our analysis of commendable bottom-up dynamics. The same holds for the considerable autonomous agency of the Cuban Armed Forces that control the largest entrepreneurial corporations and hold key ministries and agencies, such as the Ministries of Tourism, Interior and Transportation, the spatial planning agency and three out of five Vice-Presidencies.

Conclusion

Since the 2008 land reform, small farmers have virtually free access to land in usufruct, yet large tracts remain idle or underutilised as appropriate technologies and inputs for farm-level investments are unavailable or overpriced, or such investments are postponed due to insecure land tenure and marketing channels. Peasant farms face compounding constraints which restrict their capabilities to expand, intensify and diversify production. Intransparent governance and corruption in municipal level public agencies and institutions (cooperatives, agricultural delegations, land registries, market inspectors) generate significant inequalities of access. A liberalisation of land markets, interprovincial food transport and bulk marketing, or food processing businesses would likely amplify these inequalities. In this sense, the Cuban case shows that interventions of the sovereign state in favour of peasant-based food sovereignty, especially in the absence of a power balance between institutions, may create complex secondary effects whose impacts require careful examination.

At the same time, Cuba’s post-communist food policy framework differs clearly from the “shock therapy” of most other post-socialist food system transitions. A series of “anti-differentiation policies” are in place, which can effectively limit the differentiation processes between farms (Bernstein 2014) and between small businesses in food value chains. These include the strict land ceiling (67.1 ha per farm), ceilings placed on the ownership of multiple businesses and means of production (such as trucks or tractors), progressive income taxation, as well as largely free and universal public services. Cuba’s partial liberalisation of peasant production and nested markets in combination with severe, centrally-imposed obstacles for capitalist farming and markets constitutes an unusual and highly promising case of “Chayanovian politics” in contemporary rural studies (van der Ploeg 2013). Yet, it is also apparent that the state’s motives for supporting the first wave of peasant-led food sovereignty in the 1990s will not, and cannot, be the motives behind its extension in the present context. The increasing power of GAESA’s corporations, their investments in a parallel food system based on imports, brands and supermarkets, and the privileged treatment of these corporations in law and spatial planning further questions the prospects for food sovereignty and peasant-led development.

In 2016, family farms and peri-urban market gardeners produced 63–86 per cent of Cuba’s principal domestic crops, as well as 65 per cent of milk and 42 per cent of meat, most of it marketed directly or in local and regional markets constituted by small businesses in food processing, transport and retail (ONEI 2017a). Together, these actors are responsible for 35–40 per cent of the total food sales in the country (own calculation based on García Álvarez and Anaya Cruz 2015). While these advances – achieved primarily between 1993 and 2005 – merit the spotlight they have received, they have not yet constituted a viable way to feed the Cuban population and exempt it from the international corporate “third food regime” (McMichael 2009). To do so would require increases of labour productivity in all parts of the food chain or another substantial demographic shift towards rural life, farm work and self-subsistence. Horizontal value chains can feed Cuba in the future, yet this appears to be less a question of revolutionary conviction and altruism (as portrayed by the national small farmers union ANAP and replicated on thousands of billboards and murals), but of real economic incentives, legal provisions, stable markets for inputs and food products, and greater security of access and tenure. Not only would this shake deeply entrenched dogmas and prejudices against markets and private producers, it also (and perhaps more importantly) would disrupt and counteract processes of corporatisation, and disenfranchise elites benefiting from the export-import economy.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Fernando Funes-Monzote, Heriberto Vargas, Yuniell Rivera Rivera and Claudia González Marrero for their critical insights and assistance in data collection.

Notes on contributors

Louis Thiemann is PhD researcher in the Political Ecology research group at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He lives and works in Cuba and Germany, focusing on agrarian change and the political economy of self-employed labour.

Max Spoor is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Research Professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). His research on transition economies, in particular rural and environmental issues, poverty and inequality, focuses on Vietnam, China and Central and Eastern Europe but also Latin America (Nicaragua and Cuba). He has published over 120 books, chapters and articles in international peer-reviewed journals.

ORCID

Louis Thiemann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0995-9643

Notes

1 Food security is attained when each individual inhabiting a country is capable of satisfying his nutritional needs, regardless of the agricultural, trade and commercial processes involved in making and distributing these foods. The quest for food sovereignty, in turn, focuses on attaining these needs with sustainable agricultural techniques, furthering national and local self-reliance, and strengthening inclusive and reflexive food cultures.

2 Research projects carried out in Cuba, particularly in rural areas where a foreign researcher is more visible, have in most cases relied on an accord with a PCC-controlled domestic research institute or farm labour union, which supervises and/or organises data collection. Such an accord is legally mandatory for foreign researchers and is a pre-requisite for scheduling interviews with state, party and union representatives. This political economy of research has undoubtedly led to a selectivity of research on rural Cuba, and an overlap between research and solidarity groups. Our experience of such arrangements led us to choose an independent basis for this research project. While this decision has limited our access to state actors (in official capacity), it markedly increased our interviewees’ confidence to speak openly about their economic relations, including grey and black areas and practices.

3 While absence of hard data forbids conclusions regarding corruption, high positions in government and the armed forces earn only a monthly token salary of US$ 30–50, and the irregular interests hedged in the channels that distribute imported goods may be considerable.