To Remember Cuba

The accomplishments of Cuban ecosocialism, and why they matter

(Image credit: Nils Aguilar, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

by Alyaza B.

The Republic of Cuba is perhaps the most imperiled it has ever been in its nearly seventy-year history. Under the renewed weight of the United States-imposed blockade—an open attempt to foment regime change in Cuba through immiseration, or otherwise to genocidally starve the population for refusing to submit to the liberal international order—the Cuban people now face recurring blackouts, a crumbling electrical grid, and rationing of almost every essential good due to shortages. Communication infrastructure crumbles because the investment can no longer be spared to maintain it; physical infrastructure, particularly in Havana, is much the same. As of writing the aviation system, a lifeline for imports and food (and a key piece of transportation infrastructure), has now virtually shut down from fuel shortages. The situation is quite grim.

The blockade on Cuba is not only a humanitarian and political disaster, though: it is an ecocidal disaster. Inherent in the attempt to destroy Cuba is an attempt to dismantle perhaps the most ecologically advanced—and certainly the most ecologically conscious—country in the world, a country where decades of practice and a break from capitalism have facilitated unprecedented advancement and coexistence with the natural world. Under the auspices of the Cuban Revolution, and through the political and ecological development of the Cuban people, a better world—an ecosocialist world—has not only been glimpsed but in many respects realized through practice and policy.

Defense of the Cuban Revolution and its accomplishments is therefore a moral imperative for the United States left. It is not merely that doing so is right, and it is not merely that our government must be stopped from overthrowing the most accomplished post-capitalist state, and restoring hunger, destitution, and exploitation to the Cuban people. It is that Cuba is a crown jewel of ecosocialism from which we ought to learn, and in so doing enhance our own ecological praxis. Should the Cuban example fall, its ecological legacy and practice must persevere and be preserved. To this end, I present the following study.

Early ecological consciousness in Cuba

The pre-revolutionary ecological situation

It would be a significant overstatement to say that Cuba has always been ecologically inclined. In most respects the opposite is true: Cuba’s early, post-revolutionary ecological record was—like many of its revolutionary and post-capitalist contemporaries—quite poor and characterized by a development-at-all-costs mentality. But the fault on this front cannot be fairly attributed to the revolutionary government or the Cuban Revolution, at least not in whole.

Arguably the biggest contributor was the very nature of the pre-revolutionary economy—an essentially colonial one, bound inexorably to countries like the United States and more specifically their inexhaustible demand for resource-intensive sugarcane. Cuba, as René Dumont puts it in Cuba: Socialism and Development, therefore developed “not according to the needs of [itself], but rather according to the needs of the American market. [...] The Cuban farmer wanting to produce something other than sugar cane generally was unable to secure any credit.”¹

Anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of the Cuban economy during most of the early 20th century was based on a foundation of sugar, introduced by the Spanish Empire and conquered by American imperialists.² It was sugarcane and sugar-based exports (overwhelmingly to America, whose capitalists directly owned much of the Cuban sugar industry) that financed both a growing list of imports (overwhelmingly from America, whose capitalists also manufactured many of said imports) and the infrastructural demands of the sugar industry, which was the impetus for paved roads; an extensive rail network; an electrical grid; and a telephone network (each generally monopolized by American corporations).³ With the economy and development so intertwined with sugarcane, Cuban dependency on the crop and an inability to diversify in any capacity followed—a dilemma described by Louis A. Pérez, Jr. as one wherein “expansion of domestic food production [or for that matter any other method of diversification] could not be attained by any way other than at the expense of U.S. imports, and to challenge U.S. imports to Cuba was to threaten Cuban exports to the United States.”⁴

Such a heavy reliance on sugarcane in kind wrought a dramatic—and devastating—ecological transformation in Cuba, much as occurred in the other plantation states of the Caribbean. In his 2000 book Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, Richard P. Tucker observes the invariably destructive nature of sugarcane cultivation where it was introduced, writing that

In many locations primary forest was cleared expressly to plant cane. [...] Where cane grew, the cornucopia of flora and fauna was eliminated, replaced by wide acreage of only one species. In many locations the higher slopes above the cane were gradually stripped of timber to provide fuel for boiling the raw cane juice and cooking the workers’ food.⁵

Exact figures in the case of Cuba do not appear to be available; Tucker, however, suggests that one-sixth of Cuban forests had disappeared by 1899, while the research of Sergio Díaz-Briquets and Jorge Pérez-López suggest a figure closer to half of Cuban forests lost by then. The work of Orlando Rey Santos and Daniel Whittle provides an even starker figure: “[...]by 1959 more than 70 percent of [Cuba]’s forests had already been cut to make way for sugar production.”⁶ This despite the fact that—almost invariably—20% or more of the sugarcane grown per year would go unharvested, and (due to sugar quotas, fluctuations in demand, and labor policy) much of the land cleared for cultivation was seldom if ever actually used for sugarcane growing at all.⁷ Some of this land even lost its fertility within mere years of being cultivated—a result of damaging slash-and-burn practices—and became vast tracts of pasture for animals.⁸ Beyond deforestation, intensive sugarcane cultivation and the industry surrounding it also brought the usual plagues associated with industrialization—”soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, lack of sanitation, and unsafe drinking water”—for which remediation would have been difficult in the best of times.⁹

Ecological harm was also precipitated by the fact that, in the pre-revolutionary economy, both knowledge and specialization of labor were subject to hegemonic control by foreign interests. (This was swiftly weaponized against Cuba and, coupled with the blockade, caused it much difficulty in years subsequent to the Revolution.) Edward Boorstein, in The Economic Transformation of Cuba, observes that

For whom did the financially successful professionals work in Cuba? Where were the jobs and the money? The most expensive lawyers worked for the big companies, the big importers and commercial speculators, the real estate operators. The engineers and chemists worked for the large foreign-owned or foreign-oriented sugar companies, manufacturing plants, or mines. The architects worked for the real estate companies, the rich, or the government. And the doctors, dentists, and nurses served the rich and middle classes, most of whose income was tied directly or indirectly to imperialism.¹⁰

Indeed, virtually all specialized professions—from agricultural engineers to doctors and everything in between—catered not to the laboring masses but primarily to a subset of workers whose livelihoods were made possible by the colonial economy; to a small, domestic bourgeoisie; and occasionally to a sliver of the Cuban middle-class. This specialized labor was invariably limited in supply and inequitably distributed in any case, rendering its unaffordability academic to classes beyond the urban proletariat—outside of Havana, educated specialists were negligible in number.¹¹ Nor did Cuba produce a glut of domestic educated talent in this time. There were just three universities for the whole country (all closed during the final years of the Bautista dictatorship) and pre-revolution most children did not attend school; country-wide illiteracy was over 20 percent, and above 40 percent in rural areas.¹² (Rectification of this became a primary concern of the revolutionary government.)

Probably a level of brain drain was inevitable in these circumstances. Upon the victory of the revolution most specialists were promptly withdrawn from the country; or fled because of their association with the colonial economy and disapproval of the Revolution; or were simply poached by job offers from foreign governments that Cuba could not realistically match.¹³ Nevertheless, this left the revolutionary government with a largely deskilled and undereducated populace that was forced to fill the void.¹⁴ The revolutionary government also found a dire situation even among its remaining skilled population, for these skills were often non-transferable to newly-needed types of labor. The sugarcane proletariat, for example, had little agricultural knowledge besides sugar, and yet found itself expected to plug Cuba’s needs through cultivating a diverse array of crops—and members of the revolutionary government were in no position to immediately educate these laborers.¹⁵ Ecological harm under these circumstances, through no fault of the revolutionary government, was therefore guaranteed after the Revolution, and indeed much ecological harm followed as such.

But the revolutionary government was not blameless, and the disastrous ecological situation it inherited was not obligated to transpire in such a harmful manner as it actually did. Foremost among its many early errors were a lack of appreciation for the natural world—a belief that nature could only be valuable insofar as it could be bent to support human development—and reifying the development-at-all-costs mentality. Fidel Castro’s rhetoric in this early period is particularly illuminating—and, as noted by Andreas Benz, comparable to some of the very capitalists the Cuban Revolution displaced. In a 1965 speech Castro proposed that “This is what we should do with all this land – not leave a single inch of our land without making it produce something.”¹⁶ In 1970, he more bluntly stated that “Unless we master nature, nature will master us.”¹⁷ From these prescriptions followed what might well be termed an ecological holocaust.

Dramatic land clearances, comparable in severity to those enacted by the sugar capitalists, began under the auspices of mechanization and collectivization and continued into the 1970s. “To prepare vast tracts of land for the use of mechanized equipment,” write Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, “small stands of mature and productive trees were obliterated. Trees were uprooted to permit heavy tractors and combines to operate unobstructed.”¹⁸ Particularly egregious were the actions of the Che Guevara Brigade (a heavy equipment unit organized around heavy tractors and bulldozers), whose methods René Dumont noted “[...]could hardly have been more brutal. In uprooting trees the crews scooped up goodly amounts of topsoil rich in humus and shoved it, along with the tree trunks, into piles that were then set on fire.”¹⁹ Countless trees (and large amounts of potential fertilizer) were lost in this manner, and the Cuban royal palm (Roystonea regia) in particular was extirpated from much of Cuba.²⁰ Elsewhere, land was cleared by other methods that proved equally devastating. An estimated 440,000 acres (178,000 hectares) of land was rendered ostensibly productive—and quickly planted over—by being cleared of maribú (Dichrostachys cinerea) or drained of its swamplands.²¹ Much of this land was poorly suited to intensive agriculture, however, and indelicate clearance caused great damage to its thin layer of topsoil, creating subsequent infertility and substantial erosion.²²

In other cases, a lack of proper drainage also brought about severe erosion: Dumont, in his travels, documented sugarcane fields and vast plantations of banana trees wasting away for want of water—and likewise grapefruit trees receiving too much watering—each of which rendered the land unstable and less productive.²³ Erosion soon became the norm for Cuban soils, and by 1997 estimates were that “up to 70 percent of the national territory may be eroded to one degree or another, with the proportion of agricultural land thus affected reaching 90 percent.”²⁴ Another contributor to erosion was undoubtedly the high-input, fertilizer-intensive agricultural policy adopted by state-run farms in emulation of the Soviet Union. Cuba soon became one of the most extensive users of chemical inputs in the Western Hemisphere; an estimated 192 kilograms of fertilizers—many toxic to both humans and animals—were used per hectare of cultivated land in 1985, and this had grown to 202 kilograms per hectare by the end of the decade.²⁵ Damage was predictable and widespread. In the words of Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro,

The combined impacts of salinisation, acidification and organic matter loss [from high-input agriculture] contributed to nutrient insufficiency challenges in about 45 per cent of cultivated areas. Overall, more than three-quarters of farmed area showed one or another productivity impediment.²⁶

The lack of skilled technicians to oversee and coordinate agricultural work was also substantially worsened by other decisions of the revolutionary government. The hasty adoption of central planning—forced by the blockade, it is worth caveating—meant organization of projects was haphazard at best and nonexistent at worst. Formalism and bureaucracy under the early central planning system became the norm, with more care taken to ensure the mere existence of a statistic, a number, or an estimate, rather than their accuracy.²⁷ Peasant knowledge of the land was scorned or ignored while administrative personnel were installed more through assessing loyalty to the revolution than any technical competence.²⁸ Inevitably, gross errors—ones which wasted countless man-hours of labor and innumerable tracts of land—resulted that would have been averted with even minor involvement of the peasantry.²⁹ Later still, when labor shortages in the fields became a concern, the government drafted volunteer workers whose presence served only to impede and undercut the cane field macheteros and ultimately damaged the quality and scale of the sugarcane harvest.³⁰

The turn toward ecological consciousness

Such devastation, however, coexisted with the first steps toward a genuine Cuban ecosocialism. While overall ecological consciousness was low in this period, Cubans were most certainly not apathetic to ecological harm nor were they unaware of the damage done to their country by colonialism and conventional agriculture. Within months of the revolutionary government taking power, for example, it began a long-term policy of reforestation—originally called the Reforestation Plan and eventually dubbed Plan Manatí—with the support of Czechoslovakia. “Between 1960 and 1966,” say Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, “299 tree nurseries were established and 348 million trees planted.”³¹ Expansion of the tree-planting campaign continued across the next three decades—by 1982, at least 100 million trees were being planted annually—and in the two years of 1989 and 1990 alone an estimated 494,000 acres (200,000 hectares) were reforested.³² The education of those overseeing this reforestation, as well as their sophistication, also improved dramatically between 1959 and 1990: by the start of the 1990s “Cuba had more than 1,000 forestry engineers and biologists, as well as close to 2,000 forestry technicians.³³

Cuban scientists were also integral not only to reforestation efforts but to the broader trajectory of ecosocialism within Cuba itself. Given wide latitude both to experiment with new ecological methods and to disagree with established state ecological policy, scientists consequentially became the intellectual vanguard for a new ecological consciousness.³⁴ As early as the 1970s members of the Institute of Botany rejected and refused to support government clear-cutting and mountain terracing policies, pointing to the large-scale erosion both of these practices created.³⁵ Paralleling this radicalism, Cuban scientists also began research into low-input, non-intensive, and agroecological methods of agriculture; this work—also beginning in the 1970s—was facilitated by Cuba’s extensively-developed network of agricultural institutions. Data from this network soon began to demonstrate the “collateral effects, inefficiency, and unsustainability of the conventional agriculture practiced on state-owned farms,” laying the groundwork for a future switch to low-input agriculture.³⁶ Elsewhere agroecological research yielded a state-sponsored program of “biological control agents to manage pests and improve production” as well as “agroecologically-compatible techniques and tools” for farmers to make use of.³⁷ By 1982, a broad, data-informed tendency existed within the Cuban scientific community that called for the adoption of agroecological farming practices.³⁸ The Cuban photovoltaic industry also began to develop in this period: the first solar cells were produced in 1975 and by 1986 photovoltaic solar modules were actively being manufactured by the Ministry of Communications.³⁹

Modern environmental law also began to take shape in Cuba in the 1970s with the adoption of Article 27 of the 1976 Constitution, which asserted that “To assure the wellbeing of the citizens, the State and the society protect nature. It is incumbent on the competent state organs, and furthermore on each citizen, to be vigilant in order to maintain clean waters and air, and so that soils, flora and fauna are protected.”⁴⁰ Backstopping this article of the Constitution was the creation of COMARNA (the National Commission for Environmental Protection and the Rational Use of the Natural Resources) to coordinate Cuba’s many disparate ministries and agencies, and to establish a coherent legal framework for environmental protection between them. Further facilitated by the passage of Law No. 33 in 1981—the first comprehensive Cuban environmental law—COMARNA’s legal framework was eventually completed in 1990.⁴¹ In a more individual capacity, COMARNA officials agitated for the expansion of protected areas throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.⁴² Nevertheless the institution was largely a failure. Whittle and Rey Santos note that lack of executive authority severely impeded COMARNA’s intended function, as did “the fact that it lacked the capacity and legal tools, such as the environmental impact assessment and a system of environmental licences, necessary to implement environmental standards.”⁴³ In any case Evenson characterizes COMARNA’s regulations—despite the nearly decade of work put into crafting them—as “too general and unenforceable,” a belief corroborated by the work of Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López which finds just two instances of environmental law violations being prosecuted during this period.⁴⁴

With hindsight, substantial flaws in Cuban environmental law and ecological policy before 1991 become self-evident; but, particularly in the face of the United States blockade, it is difficult to speculate how something better could have fully prevailed in this time. In imposing such sanctions the United States directly robbed Cuba of hundreds of millions of dollars, and forced the country into an economically dependent (if not necessarily exploitative) relationship with the Soviet Union—a state with its own complicated ecological history—for lack of other trading partners. “Cuba’s [Comecon] membership,” adds Gustav Cederlöf, “tied the Cuban economy firmly to the Soviet-dominated economic sphere. By 1987, 87 percent of all foreign trade took place with CMEA countries and 72 percent with the Soviet Union alone.”⁴⁵ Full ecological consciousness was hardly possible with such trade constraints. Moreover, even with this support the blockade created a “scarcity of material and financial resources, [and] outdated technologies” that hampered large-scale movement in an ecologically friendly direction.⁴⁶ Whittle and Rey Santos write that even today the blockade has “hampered Cuban efforts to obtain environmental control technologies and other goods and services by prohibiting importation and by obligating Cuba to pay high prices for outdated technologies.”⁴⁷ In the popular consciousness, Cuban motor vehicles have become a particular symbol of this enforced “backwardness;” even before 1991 many were of advanced age, and their pre-1959 American or post-1959 Eastern European places of manufacture rendered them lacking in “catalytic converters and other pollution abatement devices.”⁴⁸ But clearly this dire state of affairs was never the goal for a country where in the 1970s renewable energy was vigorously studied, and in the 1980s nuclear energy so heavily pursued.⁴⁹ It was an imposition through economic warfare more than anything.

The conversion to ecosocialism

It was the Special Period—the prolonged social and economic crisis brought on by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of Comecon, and the tightening of the blockade—under which a broader shift toward ecological consciousness and ecosocialist policy finally manifested. Without question much of this was initially a matter of expedience. In a matter of months Cuba was deprived of half of its food imports; 60% of its pesticide imports; 77% of its fertilizer imports; and half of its needed petroleum. Exports and imports declined generally by around 80%, while Cuban gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by anywhere from 35% to 50% between 1989 and 1993. The Cuban economy of 1993 was a mere 65% of its 1989 size.⁵⁰ The current system simply could not have been maintained even if this was desirable.

But many of the necessary changes were also made because of the genuine ecological maturation of the Cuban government and influence from its increasingly ecologically conscious population; Cuba, writes Adam Wiskind, explicitly chose for itself a path that was “more self-reliant, less energy-intensive society without abandoning its longstanding commitment to strong health and educational programs.”⁵¹ Likewise, a willingness to break with Soviet heterodoxy and to admit its previous wrongheadedness is perhaps the only way Cuba could have—and ultimately did—survive the harsh circumstances imposed on it by the Special Period. Emblematic of this was the rehabilitation of peasant knowledge of the land, previously scorned as bourgeois and individualistic. “A pivotal component of the shift toward the new [agricultural] model,” wrote Rosset and Benjamin in 1994, “is a recuperation of the knowledge that Cuban peasants have of traditional farming techniques, as well as their active participation with state farm technicians and managers in the generation and dissemination of newer technologies.”⁵² Nor could Cuba likely have survived while attempting to maintain such absolute control over the land, over power production, or over the “right” way to do things. By relinquishing a degree of power to cooperatives, private producers, and ordinary Cuban citizens—but still “looking at the whole picture rather than narrow economistic goals” and “emphasizing collective and social motivations through which people empower themselves and gain their own expertise,” in the words of Richard Levin—the revolutionary government not only survived but began to foster genuine ecosocialism.⁵³

Rhetorical and legal ecosocialism

As has been previously indicated, the turn toward ecological consciousness had antecedents within Cuban society from the beginning of the post-revolutionary period. But 1992 was nonetheless a pivotal year for Cuban ecosocialism, both in rhetoric and practice. That year, at the UN Earth Summit, Fidel Castro signaled a dramatic shift in Cuban discourse by declaring:

Among the greatest harm that capitalism has inflicted on humanity [...] is the deterioration of nature, the destruction of the environment, the mismanagement of forests and soils, the contamination of seas and the atmosphere. Capitalism has created the problems with the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect, which many scientists believe is irreversible. [...] In barely 100 years, capitalism has exhausted most of the fossils fuels on earth, coal and oil, and sometime in the future humanity will remember with horror these 100 years of capitalist development and how it has mistreated nature, how it has poisoned everything and has created situations in which deserts are expanding, agricultural land is shrinking, soils are being affected by salinization, and natural resources are scarce.⁵⁴

That same year, Cuba began a series of extensive revisions to its environmental law and its enforcement mechanisms. During the extensive 1992 constitutional revision, Cuban legislators made a substantial change to Article 27 that clarified both its intent and made it more enforceable. Said article, which retains this wording today, was amended to read:

The State protects the environment and the natural resources of the nation. It recognizes its close relationship with sustainable economic and social development to make human life more rational and to ensure the survival, well-being and security of present and future generations. It is the responsibility of the competent state organs to apply this policy.

It is the duty of the citizens to contribute to the protection of the water, the atmosphere, the conservation of the land, the plant life, the animal life and all the rich potential of nature.⁵⁵

The ineffective COMARNA was replaced in 1994 by the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (CITMA), a cabinet-level office that was endowed with executive authority and the ability to not merely write but enforce ecological policy. CITMA was quickly tasked with refining and finishing the unfinished mandate of COMARNA; in addition to this, however, its executive authority gave it meaningful power to “promot[e] renewable energy, [and] biological conservation and agroecology in food production through, among other things, educational programmes, professional training, research funding and public outreach.”⁵⁶ This work culminated in the 1997 National Environmental Strategy (”setting the direction for a set of specific environmental laws, regulations, and initiatives needed to implement the vision for environmental protection”) and the passage of Law 81 (the “Law of the Environment,” designed to give teeth to the Strategy), both cornerstones of contemporary Cuban environmental law.

These documents, notably, were drafted not by government fiat but through a lengthy process of feedback and buy-in from Cuban workers and scientists; provincial and municipal assembly members; and domestic environmental NGOs like Pro-Naturaleza.⁵⁷ Consequently they reflected ecological consciousness beyond even that of the Cuban government post-1992. Under the Law of the Environment, sustainable development was made an explicit law of the land, and “environmental matters [must] be considered in all land use planning decisions” at all levels of government. Moreover, under the law provincial assemblies were endowed with

[...]significant authority regarding the use and protection of natural resources within their jurisdiction, including the creation of parks and protected areas, the maintenance of drinking water sources, and other environmental issues related to human settlements and communal services.⁵⁸

With clearer guidelines and enforcement now possible on some level, Cuban environmental law experienced a dramatic second wind: CITMA finalized new laws on fisheries; assessing environmental impact of foreign investments; mining; coastal zone management; conservation of forests; and the creation of a unified system for protected areas in a matter of years.⁵⁹

The greening of transportation and infrastructure

The Special Period also made significant ecological shifts necessary in sectors of Cuban society beyond its government. In urban areas, the infeasibility of both private and public transportation due to shortages of fuel and replacement parts necessitated widespread adoption of cleaner modes of transit. Owing to their cheap and efficient nature, cars and buses were replaced in many households by bicycles; in Havana alone “about a quarter of a million bicycles were distributed” in 1991, mostly imported from China.⁶⁰ By 1994 total bicycle circulation was more than two million, and a domestic industry—previously marginal—had developed to manufacture them.⁶¹ Urban cycling soon became widely adopted.⁶² Other, more improvisational methods of transportation also proliferated, particularly in rural areas: horse carts, beasts of burden, bicycle rickshaws, hitchhiking, and even walking became customary modes of transit.⁶³ Even with the formal end of the Special Period these alternative transportation methods remain well-developed—in most Cuban cities, under pressure of the blockade, such options remain the most practical for day-to-day travel.⁶⁴

The conservation of energy also became important, and saw particular strides after it was made a focus by the so-called “Energy Revolution” of the mid-2000s. In 2007, a program to replace country’s incandescent bulbs with fluorescent bulbs was launched, alongside distribution of newly-manufactured and energy-efficient air conditioners, electric fans, televisions, coffee makers, and water pumps.⁶⁵ Despite low overall uptake of renewables in the country, more than 2,300 rural schools have gradually been equipped with solar panels, citizens can now buy solar panels for private usage, and thousands of essential buildings and services have adopted solar heating for water. Energy plants powered by industrial biogas and forest biomass such as maribú show promise, and have already been introduced to the national energy mix on a limited basis.⁶⁶ Significant reductions in kerosene, gas, and oil consumption have also been observed nationally—66 percent, 60 percent, and 20 percent respectively—and few negative economic or social consequences have resulted from these reductions.⁶⁷ Most significantly the electricity network has been substantially decentralized and renovated in an effort to reduce wastage; although fossil fuels still make up around 95 percent of Cuba’s energy mix, relative decarbonization has been achieved through these methods thanks to efficiency. Cumulatively, perhaps a million tons of oil each year are saved.⁶⁸

Genuinely ecosocialist agriculture

By far the most sweeping changes—and by far the widest implementation of what could be termed ecosocialist policies—have come in agriculture, however, where high-input, fertilizer-intensive methods ceased to be practical and low-input and agroecological methods took their place.

With the exception of state-run farms, which maintain aspects of the high-input, fertilizer-intensive approach, contemporary Cuban agriculture is low-input and reliant on agroecology. As such it makes large-scale use of ecologically sustainable agriculture methods, including green manures and municipal organic waste composting; vermicomposting (worm-based composting) at mass-scale; the use of biofertilizers (such as nitrogen-fixing Rhizobium) to raise soil organic matter and nutrient levels; the use of specialized bacteria to make soil phosphorus more absorbable by plants; biological pest removal; manual weeding, nonhuman animal traction and minimal tillage; the use of intercropping; crop–livestock integration; mulching; and seed saving.⁶⁹ Complementing these practices are hundreds of municipal seed production farms, state-run supply stores, and biofertilizer centers which, according to Sinan Koont, also provide “organic fertilizers, biological pest control preparations, technical services, [and] advice.”⁷⁰ These are perhaps the only of their kind in the world.

Indeed, novel Cuban agricultural practices are countless. The country is likely the only to intentionally produce large amounts of compost and worm humus; more than 7,000 “Organic Material Centers and Microcenters” exist to facilitate this, and production levels in 2005 reached 9.8 and 2.7 million tons of compost and worm humus respectively.”⁷¹ The study and deployment of ants, parasitic wasps, and Bacillus thuringiensis to protect crops from agricultural pests has also been pioneered at-scale in Cuban fields, while microbial antagonists and neem (Azadirachta indica) have largely replaced pesticides.⁷² Government support of biodigesters—machines which anaerobically decompose manure to produce biogas—have rendered biogas a viable and stable (if marginal) source of power in rural communities.⁷³ In rural communities where sugar harvesting is substantial, carbon-neutral bagasse (sugarcane waste) is utilized similarly and at times this contribute to as much as thirty percent of the national electrical grid.⁷⁴

The most inspiring and novel agricultural innovations have come from the sphere of urban agriculture. Once a marginal and stigmatized practice—seen as essentially contrary to “long-term planning and ultimate state control over space”—Cuba has become the vanguard for large-scale urban agriculture, and it has become vital in realizing the country’s food needs and attaining broader ecological sustainability.⁷⁵ Using agroecological principles over 70,000 hectares of urban land (and, in all probability, significantly more than this) have been rendered agriculturally productive; as of 2014 urban farms produced over one million tons of fresh produce.⁷⁶ Around 70 percent of overall fruit and vegetable consumption is produced within Cuba, and urban Cubans receive around 30 percent of their daily food needs through urban production.⁷⁷ In Havana in particular, “vegetable and fruit production has reached levels hovering at or exceeding minimum levels to cover the city’s nutritional needs. Much of what is grown, especially on the organopónicos [organic gardens] and intensive gardens, covers everyday popular culinary needs[...]”⁷⁸ Significant urban reforestation and the expansion of green space more broadly has also followed from urban farming. By 2004 there existed “twelve square meters of green space per inhabitant” in Havana and “levels over thirty square meters in suburban municipalities.” In 2009 this figure had grown to twenty-three square meters for Havana residents, and appreciable reductions in the heat island effect and pollution had been observed.⁷⁹

Other significant benefits of urban agriculture have been the “increased availability and access for the Cuban population to a diverse selection of fresh fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants. This has served to increase the dietary diversity in the population and to improve nutrition in a diet that is otherwise heavily comprised of meat, rice, beans, and root crops.”⁸⁰ Widespread employment—up to 350,000 in direct employment of the urban farm system—has also been noted, as has the growth in labor participation by women.⁸¹ Urban farms lastly have a beautifying and prosocial effect, particularly as they replace previously vacant or underdeveloped plots of land. Some health clinics in Havana have even adopted urban farming and gardening as a tool for mitigating depression and other mental health issues among clients.⁸²

Environmental conservation

Unmistakable progress has also been made toward conservation in the post-1991 period, largely due to more readily enforceable environmental laws. Cuba—in spite of climate change and warming oceans—”boasts among the most well-protected marine ecosystems in the Caribbean, including coral reefs, with natural preserves covering a quarter of surrounding underwater landmasses or insular shelf.”⁸³ Owing to continued reforestation efforts Cuba was also “one of only two countries (the other being Nepal) to show a zero loss [of forested landscapes] between the years 2000 and 2013,” and an estimated 90 percent of its intact forested landscape is now legally protected from exploitation.⁸⁴ Of particular significance is the state’s effort to preserve and expand mangrove forests—which, among other things, sequester carbon; retain sediment (thus preventing erosion); and shelter coastal communities from flooding and wave action. Contrasting their status in other Caribbean states, Cuban mangrove forests have increased in size since 1993, and currently occupy the vast majority of their potential ecozone.⁸⁵

A better world is possible

The additional ecological achievements that could be recounted are endless. Necessity has rendered Cuban recycling commonplace and among the most developed in the world.⁸⁶ There exist fascinating experiments in green housing, including the Las Arboledas neighborhood (which biologically treats its sewage and uses the cleaned water to irrigate) and the Las Terraces community (which only allows cars on its periphery).⁸⁷ Citizen power often leads to the curtailing and remediation of environmental harm, and as a result the attainment of environmental justice in Cuba is widespread when elsewhere such justice is few and far between.⁸⁸ The list goes on.

None of this should be taken to mean that Cuba is a utopia, or free of problems; many persist even in the field of ecology, especially as the blockade tightens. (The work of Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López is particularly illuminating about the historical apathy against which Cuban ecosocialists have struggled.) Even now, sometimes the environmental decision-making processes are not followed, and other times they are suspended for politically expedient projects; CITMA, despite its importance, has long been underfunded and sometimes completely fails to fulfill the obligations asked of it.⁸⁹ A stubborn level of pollution (albeit lower than in other countries) persists, particularly in Havana, and decarbonization remains glacially slow despite ambitious pronouncements by the Cuban government.⁹⁰ The fight, as elsewhere, goes on.

But the fight in Cuba has already achieved so much, particularly in light of the blockade, and sustainable development has all but prevailed over development-at-all-costs. To be sure, the developmentalist tendencies within the Cuban Revolution have not been extirpated—but a growing ecological consciousness has without question marginalized them. No longer does the need for development determine rhetoric or policy by fiat. Instead, writes Richard Levins,

The conception of an ecological pathway of development is emerging from the perspectives of conservation of natural areas, agriculture, public health, urban planning, alternative energy, clean production and waste disposal, community participation, environmental education, and issues involving different sectors of society, particularly vulnerable habitats. Workplace and neighborhood pollution problems are included within the same framework.⁹¹

Little wonder then that many Cubans tout the preservation and restoration of their country’s ecology as among the Revolution’s great achievements.⁹² Even in the darkest of moments—and even as the darkness encroaches again upon their country—they stand resolute, offering a vision of a better and more ecologically sustainable world. We would be wise to stand with them, to struggle with them, and to achieve with them internationally what they have achieved at home.

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References

1. Dumont, René (1970). Cuba: Socialism and Development, p. 10

2. Tucker, Richard P. (2000). Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, p. 43; Boorstein, Edward (1968). The Economic Transformation of Cuba: A First-Hand Account, p. 2

3. Benjamin, Medea, Joseph Collins and Michael Scott (1984). No Free Lunch: Food & Revolution in Cuba Today, pp. 11–12; Bolender, Keith (2019). Manufacturing the Enemy: The Media War Against Cuba, pp. 64–65; Tucker, p. 41↩︎

4. Pérez Jr., Louis A. (2019). Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba, p. 24

5. Tucker, p. 16

6. The 1899 estimates are from Tucker, p. 27 and Díaz-Briquets, Sergio, and Jorge Pérez-López (2000). Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialism in Cuba, p. 141. The 1959 figure is from Whittle, Daniel, and Orlando Rey Santos (2006). ‘Protecting Cuba’s Environment: Efforts to Design and Implement Effective Environmental Laws and Policies in Cuba’. Cuban Studies 37: 73–103.

7. Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, p. 9

8. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 84; Funes Monzote, Reinaldo, trans. Alex Martin (2008). From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492, p. 272

9. Whittle and Rey Santos, p. 74

10. Boorstein, p. 13

11. Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, p. 10; Boorstein, p. 14

12. Koont, Sinan (2011). Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba, p. 55; Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, p. 7

13. Dumont (1970), pp. 60–61; Dumont, René, trans. Stanley Hochman (1974). Is Cuba Socialist?, p. 26

14. Dumont (1974), pp. 31 and 55–56; Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, p. 20; Boorstein, p. 55

15. Boorstein, pp. 49–50

16. Benz, Andreas (2020). ‘The greening of the revolution: Changing state views on nature and development in Cuba’s transforming socialism’. GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 29 (4): 243-248.

17. Quoted in Cabello, Juan José, et al. (2012). ‘An approach to sustainable development: the case of Cuba’. Environment, Development and Sustainability 14 (4): 573–591.

18. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, pp. 154–155

19. Dumont (1974), p. 99

20. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 155

21. Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, p. 123

22. Dumont (1970), p. 39; Boorstein, p. 50

23. Dumont (1974), p. 75

24. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, pp. 92–94

25. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 104; Koont (2011), p. 15

26. Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore (2021). Socialist States and the Environment, p. 179

27. Boorstein, pp. 162–163

28. Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, p. 125; Dumont (1970), p. 67 and 71

29. Dumont (1974), pp. 60–61

30. Benjamin, Collins, and Scott, pp. 126–127; Dumont (1970), pp. 87–88

31. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 151

32. Rosset, Peter, and Medea Benjamin. (1994). ‘Cuba’s Nationwide Conversion to Organic Agriculture’. Capitalism Nature Socialism 5 (3): 79–97.

33. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, pp. 151–152

34. Levins, Richard (1990). ‘The struggle for ecological agriculture in Cuba’. Capitalism Nature Socialism 1 (5): 121–141.

35. Levins, Richard (1993). ‘The ecological transformation of Cuba’. Agriculture and Human Values 10: 52–60.

36. Vázquez, Luis L., Jacques Marzin, and Niurlys González (2017). ‘Políticas públicas y transición hacia la agricultura sostenible sobre bases agroecológicas en Cuba‘ [Public Policies and the Transition to Sustainable Agriculture Based on Agroecological Principles in Cuba]. In Sabourin, Eric, et al. (eds.), Políticas públicas a favor de la agroecología en América Latina y El Caribe [Public Policies in favor of Agroecology in Latin America and the Caribbean] (2017). 189–232.

37. Fernandez, Margarita, et al. (2018). ‘New Opportunities, New Challenges: Har nessing Cuba’s Advances in Agroecology and Sustainable Agriculture in the Context of Changing Relations with the United States’. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 6: 76; Engel-Di Mauro, p. 179

38. Rosset and Benjamin, p. 89

39. Yaffe, Helen (2020). We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, pp. 102–103

40. Evenson, Fredric (1998). ‘A Deeper Shade of Green: The Evolution of Cuban Environmental Law and Policy’. Golden Gate University Law Review 28 (3): 489–525.

41. Engel-Di Mauro, p. 179

42. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, pp. 69–70

43. Whittle and Rey Santos, p. 79

44. Evenson, p. 507; Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 71

45. Cederlöf, Gustav (2023). The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba, p. 41

46. Evenson, p. 491

47. Whittle and Rey Santos, p. 76

48. Schweid, Richard (2004). Che’s Chevrolet, Fidel’s Oldsmobile: On the Road in Cuba, pp. 7–10; Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, pp. 197–198 and 243

49. Cederlöf, p. 61

50. Koont (2011), p. 17; Rosset and Benjamin, p. 79; Benz, p. 245

51. Wiskind, Adam (2007). ‘Cuba: sustainability pioneer?’. World Watch (July 2007).

52. Rosset and Benjamin, p. 89

53. Quoted in Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 272

54. ibid., pp. 6–7

55. Evenson, pp. 500–501

56. Engel-Di Mauro, pp. 172–173

57. Whittle and Rey Santos, p. 80; Evenson, p. 514

58. Evenson, pp. 510–511

59. Whittle and Rey Santos, pp. 82–84

60. Cederlöf, p. 110

61. Schweid, pp. 204–205

62. Premat, Adriana (2012). Sowing Change: The Making of Havana’s Urban Agriculture, pp. 53–54 and 160n4

63. Schweid, p. 15; Cederlöf, p. 110

64. Schweid, p. 49

65. Cederlöf, pp. 144–145; Cabello et al., pp. 585–586

66. Yaffe, p. 117

67. Suing, p. 34

68. Cederlöf, pp. 126–128; Suing, p. 35

69. Engel-Di Mauro, pp. 180–182

70. Koont, Sinan (2008). ‘A Cuban Success Story: Urban Agriculture’. Review of Radical Political Economics 40 (3), 285–291

71. ibid, p. 289

72. Levins (1990), pp. 127–129; Levins, Richard (2005). ‘How Cuba Is Going Ecological’. Capitalism Nature Socialism 16 (3): 7–25.

73. Cederlöf, p. 110

74. Suing, Guillaume trans. Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (2025). Communism, The Highest Stage of Ecology, p. 35; Cederlöf, p. 61 and 97

75. Premat, p. 27

76. Koont, Sinan (2009). ‘The Urban Agriculture of Havana’. Monthly Review 60 (8): 44–63; Altieri, Miguel A. and Fernando R. Funes-Monzote (2012). ‘The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture’. Monthly Review 63 (8): 23–33

77. Suing, p. 188

78. Engel-Di Mauro, p. 187

79. Koont (2009)

80. Fernandez et al., p. 7

81. Koont (2011), p. 175

82. Premat, p. 65

83. Engel-Di Mauro, p. 171

84. Roman, Joe (2018). ‘The Ecology and Conservation of Cuba’s Coastal and Marine Ecosystems’. Bulletin of Marine Science 94 (2): 149–69

85. ibid., pp. 159–160

86. Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 258; Altieri et al., (1999). ‘The greening of the “barrios”: Urban agriculture for food security in Cuba’. Agriculture and Human Values 16: 131–140

87. Kaufman, Holly (1993). ‘From Red to Green: Cuba Forced to Conserve Due to Economic Crisis’. Agriculture and Human Values 3 (10): 31–34

88. Bell, Karen (2011). ‘Environmental justice in Cuba’. Critical Social Policy 31 (2): 241–265

89. Bell, pp. 253–254; Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López, p. 74; Whittle and Rey Santos, p. 93

90. Engel Di-Mauro, pp. 174–176; Bell, p. 246

91. Levins (2005), p. 19

92. Bell, p. 246