14ymedio, Elías Amor Bravo, Economist, July 6, 2020 — There are serious challenges in the Cuban agricultural sector for more and better production, and Diario de Cuba has confirmed the discontent in large sectors of the campesino population over the repressive measures being applied by the Communist government.
These measures go beyond the precariousness that exists in the country, and what are considered “illegal” practices in Cuba are accepted practices by everyone who farms in countries where the free market regulates production.
In Cuba, the Government’s denunciations against the farmers have their origin in the terrible and deficient administrative judicial structure of the country, which, far from contributing to tackle the problems, makes them worse in an exorbitant way. There are all kinds of denunciations. The League of Independent Farmers, one of the organizations that promote the campaign, “Without the countryside there is no country”, has offered us some clues.
If there are problems in the food and feedstuff supply for animals, why does the Government have to sanction and repress an efficient producer who has a surplus and sells it to other producers? What reason prevents a pig farmer from obtaining some income from the sale of excess food that will certainly end up being allocated to other intermediate suppliers or the needs of the business itself? But no. This practice has been repressed by the authorities as a consequence of the denouncements that are multiplying among the producers themselves, pressured by the Communist organization, which at the local level maintains an iron control over operations to prevent them from being profitable and growing.
Another example has been the State’s intervention in harvests. Who said that expropriations don’t exist in Cuba? Far from advancing toward a necessary liberalization of the production and commercialization of agricultural products, the Government, in a return to the Communist norm since June 18, has reinforced centralization and State control over economic activities. In reality, intervention in the harvest of a producing farmer means his ruin and the impossibility of resuming the activity, in addition to the sanctions that can be applied.
Moreover, the Regime uses its communication media to blame the producing farmer as someone guilty of hoarding food and creating hunger. Instead of promoting the social image of the campesinos, as agents charged with sustaining the population in these difficult times, they are converted, in the eyes of the population, into thieves whose goal is to hide the harvests dedicated to Acopio, Cuba’s State Procurement and Distribution Agency. An injustice.
This campaign by the authorities to undermine the social base of the free campesinos in Cuba is provoking the first fears founded on the continuous aggression and the instruments of repression that exert a chilling effect on the freedom of economic participants. A sale of a product at a price which doesn’t agree with Acopio, for example, results in the immediate confiscation of the harvest. And the problem is none other than Acopio’s prices. While Cubans have to face elevated prices in the markets where they make their purchases, the producer is barely paid for his work, and furthermore, the debts of the State, prolonged in time, end up generating problems of solvency.
The League has denounced equally the scant attention paid by the Communist leaders to the needs of the farmers, something so simple as repairing a roof by supplying the construction material that the farmers can’t freely acquire. Rains affect the harvest, but without insurance that covers the damage, the losses ravage the field, and the State doesn’t assume its part of the responsibility. This occurs even with tobacco, a product intended for export that provides very important hard currency to the Government, income which barely reaches the producer.
To these problems are added infestations and infections that can’t be combatted because of the lack of pesticides and treatments that, instead of being produced in the country, have to be imported from the exterior. I don’t know what they are waiting for to advance in creating substitutions for imports. The Government is limited to blaming the embargo, but it doesn’t provide solutions to the problems.
Many of us ask how it’s possible that agriculture in Cuba produces these types of problems. That campaign, “Without the countryside there’s no country” is fully justified, because it looks for a 180-degree change in present conditions, certainly complicated, in those who engage in agricultural activity in Cuba.
The demands for freedom by food producers and the suspension of taxation for at least 10 years to strengthen development have been answered with more vigilance and repression. The consequence is that the shortage of food will increase, and Cuba will approach that food crisis spoken about by the United Nations World Food Program, which the Cuban authorities don’t want to recognize.
Time is running out for urgent changes, and hardship approaches. The problem of food is not going to be solved by planting in the yards of city homes, or in pots or on balconies. It cannot be solved until the ownership of the land is returned to the farmers and the free market in order to decide what they deem appropriate for their production and harvests.
It’s not a matter of leasing more land. Raúl Castro’s formula hasn’t given the predicted results. What needs to be done is to reverse the Communist agrarian reform, which has been a big historic fraud for Cuban campesinos, and which has prostrated the formerly competitive Cuban agriculture, in a structural crisis. The Cuban countryside can return, but it needs support and freedom. And thus, it has to be said very clearly, “Without the countryside there is no country”.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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