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HAVANA - At the most difficult time, when food prices rise dramatically in the great bazaar of global markets, Cuba stumbles again on the same old stone of farm inefficiency, which forces it to spend its meager external finances on imports of rice, beans, milk and other essential comestibles brought to the table every day.
No country has performed the Biblical miracle of multiplying loaves and fishes with equity. The Market God cynically solves, in Barranquilla or Katmandu, by the vagaries of supply and demand, the dilemma of so many hungry mouths: If you have, you eat.
But the island is pressured even more, because it accustomed its children for years to eat with austerity, but in the context of voluminous social consumption kept up by subsidies, which stressed to untold limits its agricultural and productive inefficiencies – aside from the U.S. blockade, the hurricanes and droughts.
The truth is that the Cuban countryside, after testing many extensive formulas, centralized and concentrated, with strong state leadership in the production-distribution-exchange-consumption cycle, has been looking for a long time to diversify its forms of ownership and unleash its productive forces to continue to feed the country.
The challenge is fierce. The slightly more than 20 years of the disjunctive Special Period, the shutdown of the “pipeline” that fed and spoiled Cubans with strange Slavic canned goods acquired at any cost from the failed European socialist nations, the root transformations of the 1990s to establish cooperatives and free the land from hegemonies and state tutelage that in the end remained. Any retelling of this leads to the final structural and functional knot that must be untied in Cuban agriculture, the primary sector of the economy in a poor country.
President Raúl Castro himself has been prolific in his public warnings about the need to revolutionize agriculture and rescue it from the weeds of inefficiency, low yields, the disincentive to work, and the alienation of a sense of ownership. He has described the priority of Cubans' nourishment as “a matter of national security” and has enjoined the farm industry to lead the substitution of imports required by this economy.
The fallow, marabú-filled lands that the Cuban state failed to manage and make fruitful, the government is now delivering in usufruct to the citizens who turn their eyes and hopes to the fields. An incipient horizontality begins to articulate, after so many vertical and centralized designs. The prices of important items are increased to encourage farmers and raise flagging production.
But the main enemy of the changes is the ballast of old, eroded habits, the haphazard bureaucracy that rears its ugly head, against which President Raul Castro is leading a colossal battle. State entities that, like the farmer's dog, don't tend to their land but are reluctant to give them away under any pretext, a weak contractual base between state enterprises and agricultural producers that causes losses in the fields by not picking up the products on time ... blunders, financial indiscipline ... a hegemonic state collection agency (Acopio) that aims to monopolize all distribution and marketing, so that ultimately too many intermediaries increase the cost of Cuban foods and pocket the bigger slice.
The Sixth Congress of the Communist Party proposed unleashing the productive forces in the fields, diversifying economic figures and forms of ownership in a model of sustainable agriculture. It proposed reducing the number of intermediate manipulators who joyously stand between the producer and the consumer, and paying integral attention to the socioeconomic development of rural areas in a country where barely one in five Cubans works the fields.
The Cuban Government has reiterated its irreversible political will to carry out the changes in what it calls the “actualization of the economic model” for more and better socialism, and leave behind all the crippling burdens that have proven ineffective. And that will can only break through to the extent that the man who works the land can see his growing contribution to the table of his brothers rewarded by well-being and plenteousness.
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