Urban Agriculture: A Cuban Success Story

Historically, the relationship between the US and Cuba has been less than healthy. But now that the Cold War has thawed and Obama seems interested in a fresh with one of our closest neighbors, it's time we take a cue from Cuba's agricultural present, and learn from its past.

Cuba has a history of intense monoculture and industrial agriculture. For a long time, Cuba was home to huge sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations, owned by the Spanish and powered by African slaves. When slavery ended and the Spanish lost control of the island, Cuba's agricultural system reoriented to export almost exclusively to the U.S. market. In 1959, however, when the communist revolutionaries took over Cuba, Cuba established a close trade relationship with the Soviet Union, exporting sugar to the USSR at an inflated price and importing 90 percent of their petroleum products from Russia. As a result, industrial agriculture flourished in Cuba and their high agricultural outputs depended upon the heavy use of petroleum-based fertilizers. It is also important to point out that during this high yield era of Cuban agricultural history, the island was not producing its own food because it was cheaper to import food via the Soviet Union. This became a major problem in 1991 when the communist regime in Russia collapsed. Practically overnight, Cuba not only lost its source of cheap petroleum, upon which its entire agricultural system was based, but also the steady stream of cheap, imported food.

It's hard to imagine what would happen to the agricultural world today if suddenly we could no longer rely on oil, but that is exactly the situation Cuba was forced to face. If the U.S. can admit to one positive thing borne out of Castro's leadership, perhaps this is it: Since the early 1990s, Cuba has once again become an agricultural nation, but of a very different sort. The lack of manufactured fertilizers means that almost all agriculture in Cuba is now organic, and the lack of fuel for transportation and production means that a very large portion of Cuba's produce is sourced very locally. In Havana, almost all produce is grown through community-based urban agriculture, or "organoponicos."

Organoponicos began as a community response to food shortages after the fall of the Soviet Union, but was quickly reinforced and enforced by the government. Castro himself mandated that every available piece of land be cultivated, and sure enough gardens cropped up on balconies, in empty lots and rooftops. Most organoponicos use a system inspired by the hydroponic systems left behind by the Soviet influence, but were rendered unusable without chemical fertilizers. Cuba has perfected a way to create productive farming spaces in urban areas with poor soil and still use water and other organic inputs efficiently. Many of the urban garden plots in Havana are raised beds made of cement or metal troughs and filled with organic matter, often remnants of sugar cane, and some soil or compost. Sparse drip irrigation lines run the length of each bed. The result is high yields of organic vegetables, herbs, and medicinal plants in small spaces squeezed in all over the city of Havana.

It is debatable whether or not other countries would be able to come up with such a productive response to the end of agricultural petroleum use. The Cuban government certainly had a strong hand in creating organoponicos, even if it began as a movement by the people. It will be interesting to see how whether or not Venezuelan cities will catch on as Hugo Chavez implements "Organoponico Bolivar" in Caracas. In any case, Cuba's successful recovery from a major oil, and therefore a major agricultural and food, crisis should be a real source of inspiration for the rest of us who live in a world with increasingly finite resources.