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alyazai think almost everyone who follows me is aware of the illegal, horrific blockade on Cuba that has been imposed by the United States since approximately 1960; what you are probably less aware of though is how the blockade manifested in practice, the pressures it put Cuba under even before the fall of the Soviet Union, and what it was like at its worst during the 1990s. today's post will go into these details.
the situation before the embargo
Cuba has historically been extremely dependent on imports, some of which is a product of its geography and some of which is a product of ideology and capitalism. as summarized by Sinan Koont in Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba:
The tropical climate makes it difficult to cultivate temperate-zone crops, such as wheat and soybeans, which are common staples of human and animal diets. Grains for feeding cattle or baking white bread, which is now central to the Cuban diet, must all be imported. In addition, the historical legacy of colonial agriculture—which was based on the cultivation of one or two highly labor-intensive export crops, mainly sugar, using slaves imported from Africa (and later indentured workers from China)—led to the relative neglect of food crops. Not only was land used disproportionately for export crops, but this relative overemphasis extended to areas such as research and development, credit and services provision, and governmental fiscal support. All these factors made food security import-dependent and likely to evaporate, especially for slave or slave-descendant populations, during hard times for export industries.
as a consequence, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution "imports constituted a third of all food consumed in Cuba, and 70 percent of imported foodstuffs came from the United States," according to Adriana Premat. few attempts were made by the pre-Revolution government to mitigate this import dependence. it could nevertheless be said that Cuban food security was superficially decent as long as imports continued: Koont does note that Cubans in this period received approximately 2,500 calories per capita per day. belying these numbers, however, were the inequal distribution of wealth and land; the large-scale usage of seasonal employment (meaning rates of unemployment in the 30% range at any given time); widespread illiteracy and poverty; and a general lack of amenities, especially in non-urban areas. many of these inequalities were factors in the growth, and eventual success, of revolutionary sentiment.
the Cuban Revolution of course sought to rectify this squalid state of affairs, and in most areas its program was quite successful from the beginning. agrarian and urban land reforms had been largely carried out by 1963 (with compensation, although this did little to placate capitalist interests or quell American anti-Cuban sentiment), and health care and education became far more accessible to Cubans.1 one area in which it was not successful however was diversifying Cuba's agricultural produce and minimizing its import dependence. efforts to move away from the island's sugarcane monoculture—which had characterized the pre-Revolution economy and was a major source of income—were hampered by poor planning, labor shortages, and reduction in export earnings that obliged the government to keep the monoculture in place.
the embargo during the Cold War
it is likely a renewed move away from sugarcane would have occurred if not for worsening relations with the United States; nevertheless, the failure to accomplish this ended up having significant downstream implications. prompted by Cuba's program of expropriation, and to a lesser extent by its declaration of socialist ideology in 1960, the United States gradually implemented sanctions—and then the full-on embargo that continues to this day—on Cuba. such punitive actions by the United States had severe effects, and foregrounded a number of uncomfortable points of weakness in the Cuban system that the revolutionary government could not trivially resolve.
the first of these was suddenly pushing the island's food supply into extreme precarity. with a substantial portion of the island's calories contingent upon importation, shortages became the norm by 1962. food rationing and the ration booklet (libreta)—for which Cuba is so infamous—was implemented as a consequence; this was, and to this day remains, the only way to ensure a baseline level of food security for all Cubans.
the second of these was how the embargo definitively pushed Cuba into the Soviet sphere of influence—and as a byproduct, locked Cuba into another relationship in which they became extremely import-dependent. while trade deals with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries allowed Cuba to attain high levels of food security (reaching 2,900 calories per capita per day by 1989), they also incentivized the continuation of the sugarcane monoculture and the adoption of a rigid, inflexible, export-oriented agricultural system. Cuba, writes Koont, "essentially became the provider of sugar and citrus fruits to COMECON [the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance]." in exchange, observe Rosset and Benjamin (1994), Cuba received
petroleum, industrial equipment and supplies, agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides, and foodstuffs — possibly as much as 57 percent of the total calories consumed by the population. [But t]he favorable terms of trade which Cuba obtained for sugar and its other exports made it cheaper for Cuba to export sugar and import foodstuffs than to produce sufficient food domestically.
thus it is only somewhat exaggeratory to say that the Cuban agricultural system during the Cold War came to imitate much of what had been overthrown in the first place—with the embargo in place, agricutural exports became one of the primary ways Cuba could pay for its much-needed imports. the consequences of such an agricultural system and its importance to ensuring Cuba could import goods were, of course, significant. arguably this relationship led to the disastrous 1970 sugar campaign, where much of the non-agricultural economy withered as the country's laborers attempted—and failed—to meet a sugar harvest quota of 10 million tons. another consequence was severe ecological harm, not dissimilar to what is seen on import-dependent capitalist island nations. "Nearly 80% of agricultural lands in Cuba, says Koont, "had been incorporated into the state sector and organized into gigantic farms under centralized government control" by 1975. the export-focus of these farms obliged them to care exclusively about yield, meaning Cuba
was using more fertilizers per hectare than the United States or any Latin American country: 202 kg/ha compared with 93 kg/ha in the United States and 56 kg/ha in Latin America. Its use of 22 tractors per 1,000 ha exceeded the averages for the Caribbean region (17), Latin America (11), and the entire world (19).
productivity decreases, nutrient deficiencies, and issues of erosion were eventually noted in up to 75% of cultivated areas—clearly a result of this extreme reliance on fertilizers and petroleum products, but which only additional fertilizer inputs were in a position to make up for.
the third point of weakness was Cuba's now-unique vulnerability to even minor shocks or disruptions of its imports and exports (which it should be noted did not ever fully cover the economic damage imposed by the embargo). this vulnerability did not go unnoticed or unexploited by the United States, which spent most of the Cold War attempting to reinstate capitalism in Cuba by any means necessary. the constant assassination attempts on Fidel Castro are only the most obvious manifestation of attempts to disrupt Cuba, of which there were many others such as Operation Mongoose and the proposed Operation Northwoods. not to be outdone by the government, though, there were also grassroots pressures against Cuba: from the 1960s to the 1980s Cuban exiles were among the most prolific terrorists in the United States, committing dozens of bombings against Cuba and agitating for regime change by the United States.
Cuba was also misfortunate or, in some cases, hubristic in a way that backfired. the country experienced a wide variety of setbacks throughout the Cold War and particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. these included two major outbreaks of African swine fever virus in 1971 and 1980 that necessitated the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs; the introduction of blue mold disease which affected a quarter of Cuba's tobacco crop in 1979 and almost all of it in 1980, apparently necessitating the halting of the tobacco industry for almost two years; the introduction of sugarcane rust disease in 1979, to which Cuba's most common variety of sugarcane was especially vulnerable and which necessitated large-scale replanting; dengue fever epidemics in 1977 and 1981 that infected 4 million and 350,000 people respectively; and a major outbreak of acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis in 1981.
for rather understandable reasons, i should note that Cuba has called many of these events biological warfare or terrorism from United States. owing to the clandestine nature almost all such acts would involve—and the general context of United States desperation to restore capitalist rule—it is hard to rule this out completely. but the prevailing evidence is too weak on all counts for me to endorse any claim like this. Raymond A. Zilinskas is rather thorough in assessing, and dismissing, such claims in his paper "Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare by the United States: Assessing the Evidence." medical researchers such as Trotta et al. also categorically dismiss any link between the CIA, Cuban rebels, and the introduction of African swine fever virus.
an allegation in this space that is not worth dismissing out of hand, though, comes from Warren Hinckle and William Turner's The Fish is Red, in which a whistleblower the pair interviewed alleges that in 1969 and 1970,
Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the California desert [...] overflew the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains over nonagricultural areas and left the cane fields arid (the downpours caused killer flash floods in some areas).
this may sound like the most outlandish of the claims—and there is no reason to believe cloud seeding itself was responsible for either the aridity or the downpours—but it is actually the most plausible claim based on available evidence. this allegation coincides with Operation Popeye, a military cloud-seeding project (based on research carried out at China Lake Naval Weapons Center) that the Air Force carried out over Vietnam in an attempt to extend the monsoon season. for approximately five years, the United States actually was, on most days, dumping two sorties of lead iodide and silver iodide into the atmosphere over Vietnam. it does not seem super implausible a more limited campaign of experimentation was being done to Cuba in this period.
the embargo after the Cold War
all of these points of weakness became far more severe as the Eastern Bloc began to liberalize and disintegrate. Gorbachev's ascension in 1985—and his subsequent termination of special deals with Cuba—arguably mark the start of an inevitable trend toward catastrophe that accelerated as the 1980s progressed. between 1986 and 1990 Cuba experienced significant financial contraction, something it attempted to fight and protest to COMECON without much success. although often dated to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in many respects the Special Period had already begun by 1989—by then it was clear that COMECON was totally dysfunctional, and most of the Eastern Bloc had de facto begun to cut Cuba loose. when the Soviet Union began to be delinquent on contracted imports in 1990, conservation efforts were already in place. the formal dissolution of the COMECON in August 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 were largely formalities for Cuban purposes.
the formalistic nature of these events was small comfort to Cubans, however. the socialist bloc of countries had previously received more than 80% of Cuba's trade—with these gone, and the embargo still in place, what can only be described as apocalyptic reductions in the availability of everything followed. Cuba lost 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%. Cuban gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by anywhere from 35% to 50% between 1989 and 1993, and the Cuban economy of 1993 had shrunk to 65% of its 1989 size. Cuban money became largely worthless, both because real wages fell by more than 50% and because the state became unable to offer consumer goods on which to actually spend said money. factories became inoperable between energy cuts and loss of raw material inputs, while agriculture collapsed so severely that it necessitated a break-up of state farms. car travel became prohibitive between shortages of gasoline and lack of car replacement parts and dropped by one-third from its already low level; public transportation, likewise, ground largely to a halt, rendering bicycles the only realistic way to travel for many. the state-subsidized ration stores, which Premat says "previously adequately covered basic food needs," were rendered unable to do so and soon provided only around half of established nutritional requirements—a dramatic loss of calories per capita followed. according to Koont, by 1994:
the daily per capita nutritional intake of the Cuban population had reached its nadir at levels well below the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] recommendations for a healthy diet (given in parentheses): 1,853 calories per day (2,400 calories recommended), 46 grams of protein (72 grams recommended), and 26 grams of fat (75 grams recommended).
the situation, in short, amounted to one of the most substantial reversals of peacetime quality of life ever observed.
that this situation did not quickly topple the government outright is a testimony to the deep support for socialism in Cuba; nevertheless, the United States saw blood in the water and attempted to deliver a crippling final blow through tightening the already punitive embargo. in 1992 the Torricelli Act banned exports of food and medicine to Cuba (excepting only humanitarian aid), and in 1996 the Helms-Burton Act made foreign corporations doing business in Cuba subjects of U.S. sanctions. under the latter bill in particular, according to Premat, U.S. companies were endowed with the power to "sue foreign companies that conduct business with Cuba involving property previously “confiscated” by the Cuban government from U.S. citizens." (unsurprisingly, this law violates international trade law.) both of these laws undoubtedly served to make the crisis worse and longer lasting.
things bottomed out roughly in 1994, by which point the Cuban government was obliged (after much citizen participation and debate through the workers’ parliaments) to enact a degree of liberalization. so summarizes Helen Yaffe in We Are Cuba!, the state legalized the US dollar, committed to a fiscal adjustment, committed to joint ventures with foreign capital, opened up further to tourism, began large-scale conversion of state farms into cooperatives, opened private farmers’ markets, and increased avenues for self-employment. these reforms (which were generally intended to be temporary and last only as long as the crisis did) were instrumental in halting—and reversing—the crisis. growth ultimately returned in the second half of the 1990s and, slowly but surely, things began stabilize back toward normality. although a number of them have continued in some form or another, many of these reforms were reversed or repealed by the mid-2000s as their necessity receded.
the effects of the economic crisis still echo through Cuba, unfortunately. in many respects it marks a permanent delineation of before and after—Cuba before the crisis was simply in a much better position than it is today, and even 35 years later this shows no signs of changing. as Yaffe says solemnly:
living standards had not recovered their 1990 level by the end of the decade, productive capacity, infrastructure and public services had been crippled, and the dual economy and price distortions had skewed incentives and entrenched inequalities. The economic contraction generated a social crisis. Cuts in food consumption, utility supplies, basic goods and transport led to malnutrition, emigration, inequality and illegality.
notes
1 the change was quite remarkable. Agustin Lage Davila says that on the education front, the mass literacy campaigns of 1961 involved "more than 270,000 voluntary teachers" and led to 700,000 people being taught to read and write. on the healthcare front according to Don Fitz, by 1963 the revolutionary government had built "122 rural centers and forty-two rural hospitals, with 1,155 beds, 322 doctors, and 49 dentists." Koont says there had previously been just three general hospitals for all of rural Cuba.