“We are not Asians, that is not a Cuban habit,” argues a Cuban official
14ymedio, Havana, December 26, 2025 — Thoroughly debunked, the cliché that the Chinese word for “crisis” means “opportunity” has been used by both politicians and motivational talk gurus, and this week national food officials have appealed to its spirit to call for a change in the Cuban diet. Seated with Marxlenin Pérez Valdés on her program Cuadrando la Caja, Roberto Caballero, a member of the National Executive Committee of Agricultural and Forestry Technicians, and José Carlos Cordobés, Director General of Industrial Policy at the Ministry of Food Industry, argued that to achieve food sovereignty the best course would be to change habits that clash with the reality of Cuban soils and to remove potatoes and rice from the regular diet.
“And once an Italian asked me, quite rightly: ‘Why do you spend so much money on potatoes when you have sweet potatoes, yucca, yams, malanga, and with the money you spend on potatoes they could flood the country with all those products?” said Caballero. The technician explained that potatoes have never adapted well to the territory, and although he did not give a reason – that potatoes thrive in temperate to cool climates, while the Island’s warm humidity favors pests – he specified the enormous investment that the country has made to plant them, keep them at suitable temperatures and curb the diseases that plague them.
It is an unprofitable product, he wanted to make clear, but he put it in such a way that host Pérez Valdés herself was taken aback, especially when he stressed that rice is not an easy food to grow in Cuba. “Roberto wants to take away even our rice! José Carlos, help me with this,” the presenter exclaimed in alarm when Caballero explained that this grain has been incorporated into the national culture, without being realistic. “We are not Asians, that is not a Cuban habit,” he stressed, before considering that, although it is already an established tradition, that too could change. “With the shortages that exist, anything you put out for people will sell,” he asserted.
That part of the conversation is what has generated the most ink among the population, although there were other, more interesting segments in the program, which dealt with the situation of food production. The officials reviewed the factors that have led to the current dire situation, while refraining from throwing stones at the government. The energy situation, the passage of Hurricane Melissa, the shortage of inputs to produce and, of course, the US “blockade” were mentioned, but they also openly criticized a policy that has been widespread on the Island for decades: price caps.
“There are many things that could be solved but which have not been solved this year, and which in the long run will lead to totally insufficient levels of production”
“For farmers, production costs have skyrocketed enormously, which we then suddenly try to regulate by imposing price caps, and the only consequence is that they stop producing, because they cannot sell at a price lower than what it costs to produce,” said Cordobés, who also railed against the delays caused by bureaucratization.
“There is the whole problem of non-payments; there is the whole problem of delays in the procedures that farmers have to go through. In other words, there are many things that could be solved but which have not been solved this year and which in the long run lead to production levels that are totally insufficient,” he lamented.
Cordobés, however, also made some remarks that surprised viewers. “Today the country has an industrial infrastructure that, with a different dynamic in agriculture, improved financial flows for the country and the ability to import the raw materials needed, would allow industry to meet the demands of the population. I think that’s very important,” he said. In other words: if things worked properly in the country, there would be no problem. To put it bluntly.
The officials, satisfied that the industry “does not need investments but does not exploit them efficiently,” regretted that at present there is no foreign currency to import everything that would be needed, and they congratulated themselves because the “links” – the private enterprises – have contributed a lot and in a satisfactory way. “We should be closing at around 70,000 tons of product with those actors. Without them, we would not have incorporated that amount into our system. So somehow the industry has been able to take advantage of that scenario.”
“Well, I do organic farming. It’s less efficient, more expensive, but I sell the product at a higher price. So the person who has money eats healthy food and the others continue to be poisoned. I mean, that doesn’t fit in our system.”
Roberto Caballero has also analyzed Cuba’s conditions, with a tradition of small farms in most areas of agriculture – excepting sugar cane – for reasons which he attributed mainly to the climate and the saline soils. “There are those out there who have said that we cannot be self-sufficient in food, that Cuba doesn’t have the right conditions,” he noted, and he also admitted that in a globalized world, full sovereignty is not indispensable either, but that it is important to accept the circumstances of each country.
“The other day we were talking to some Koreans and they said that they practically don’t produce food. As they have many minerals and export a lot of technology, what they do with the money they earn is to buy food. Ah, okay, that’s a solution. But we don’t even consider that; it wouldn’t be valid for us, because they don’t have a blockade* and we do,” he emphasized.
The officials also spoke at length about sustainable agriculture and said that Cuba must strike a balance with this model because, while it is important, it may in some sense contradict the State’s principles of social justice. “For there this problem of the environment is very easily solved. Well, I do organic farming. It’s less efficient, more expensive, but I sell the product at a higher price. So the person who has money eats healthy food, while others continue to be poisoned. That doesn’t fit into our system,” they said. However, they do not deny that, in the long run, an improvement can be achieved.
The final segment was entirely devoted to theorizing about how to produce more, but, again, it all came down to the usual pie-in-the-sky story and how with foreign currency, exporting and generating income, things would get better. “It’s a big task we have for the year 2026, and things can be done in this scenario. Even with these complexities, things can be done,” they promised. One more year.
Translator’s note: There is, in fact, no US ‘blockade’ on Cuba, but this continues to be the term the Cuban government prefers to apply to the ongoing US embargo. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the US ordered a Naval blockade (which it called a ‘quarantine’) on Cuba in 1962, between 22 October and 20 November of that year. The blockade was lifted when Russia agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from the Island. The embargo had been imposed earlier in February of the same year, and although modified from time to time, it is still in force.
Translated by Regina Anavy