Fidel Castro's boys secret hippies...

Who woulda thunkit? Commandante Guillermo Garcia Fritas, one of the five original "commandantes" of the 1959 Cuban revolution, was a nature lover that pushed the Cuban government to adopt a strong environmental ethic for a generation of scientists and government officials.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Cuban factories and agricultural fields have lain dormant. The island has had to become self-sufficient, turning to low-energy organic farming.

"The solution it (Cuba) chose...essentially unprecedented both within the developed and undeveloped world...was to establish a self-sustaining system of agriculture that by necessity was essentially organic."

//seattlepi.nwsource.com/

Cuba prioritized food production. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option and exported 'what they were good at' and imported food. The Cubans went for food security and part of that was prioritizing small famers.

Cuba is filled with more than 7,000 urban allotments , or organopoicos, which cover as much as 81,000 acres. They have been established on tiny blocks of land in the centre of tower-block estates or between the crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. More than 200 gardens in Havana alone supply its citizens with more than 90% of their fruit and vegetables. Of all these gardens, the Vivero Organoponico Alamar is considered one of the most successful. Established less than 10 yearsago, the 0.7 hectare plot employs about 25 people and provides a range of healthy, low-cost food to the local community.

A tour of the garden shows details like a shed of tomatoes that had produced five tonnes of fruit in six-months, housed in a self-designed metal pyramid structure, a worm farm packed with California red worms and bright marigolds planted at the end of each row of vegetables to attract bees and butterflies.

The land is owned by the givernment and everything grown there is split 50-50. The surplus is theirs to sell the with the profits divided among them. Along with free meals for the workers, such cooperation and socialist idealism is easy to be attracted to, and indeed is a good example of what Castro's international supporters saw in his revolution.

OK, let's see if I can put it in a nutshell. Apologies if this doesn't work-I am not known for brevity:-)

In the late 80's Cuba's agriculture had one aim,-produce as much sugar cane as possible, which the Soviets bought at more than 5x the market price. In addition the Soviet Union purchased 95% of its citrus crop and 73% of its Nickel. In exchange, the USSR provided Cuba with 63% of its food imports and 90% of its petrol. So, quite a vulnerable position for a country to be in, No? When the USSR collapsed all the subsidies stopped and Cuba's future looked a tad bleak.

The UN food and agriculture organization suggests that the daily calorie intake of the average Cuban fell from about 2600 c/day in the late 80's to between 1000 and 1500 by 1993. People had to get by on about half the food they had been eating. With no subsidies and limited resources, the Cuban regime decided to look inward. Ceasing to organize its economy around the export of tropical products and the import of food, it decided to maximise food production. By necessity, this meant a back-to-basics approach; with no Soviet oil for tractors or fertilizer it turned to oxen, with no Soviet oil for its fertilizer and pesticide, it turned to natural compost and the production of natural pesticides and beneficial insects. Crop rotations, green maturing, intercropping and soil conservation have all been incorporated into polyculture farming.

It has worked. Annual calorie intake now stands at about 2600c/day, while UNFAO estimates that the % population considered undernourished feel from 8% in 92 to 3% in 2002. Cuba's infat mortality rate is lower than that of the US, while at 77 years, life expectancy is the same.

In the old system it took 10 or 15 units of energy to produce one unit of food energy (similar to the stats for beef production),-remarkable economically inefficient.

But could Cuba's labor-intensive example be repeated without the availability of large numbers of enforced workers? Professor Jules Petty, of the University of Essex's dept of biological sciences says;

"I don't know. I think it is true that it has required much labout...the thing is, it has also produced alot of food...People are closer to their food production. (In the West) we are worried that we don't know about where our food comes from. In Havana, people are closer to their food production and that may also have psychological benefits".

Food for thought indeed.