Archives for the 'cuba' tag
Should We Try to be Like Cuba?
That’s the question Slashfood is asking, citing a Philly Inquirer article that, hyperventilating, calls the backward island nation’s urban farming program “a stunning success.” Via Slashfood:
Yesterday, the Philadelphia Inquirer had an article praising Cuba’s urban farming program for being able to supply much of Cuba’s vegetables. It also provides 350,000 jobs with considerably high pay. Futhermore, it has increased food options for a country that was heavily dependent on a diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe. With a population that is 80 perecent urban, it would only make sense for them to develop an urban agricultural agenda.
Since the majority of people in the United States live in urban areas, it seems like this model might help relieve the current food shortages. Can cities like New York City adapt the Cuban program?
Heavens to Mao no! No, no no!
As an urban farmer in America–I think my 625 sq. ft. or so plot qualifies me, over my dead body will or should any “program” force us to de-industrialize and become a nation of urban farmers. Small businesspeople, of which farmers are a subset, indeed form part of the backbone of our economy. But so too do the researchers, investment bankers, universities, professional sports teams, and corporations.
Every society strives to emerge from subsistence farming. The principal struggle of man over the millennia has been to move from the forest to the farm to the cities–and not so we can farm some more.
Take Ireland, once a nation of potato farmers. When blight struck, millions died tragically in an horrendous famine. People couldn’t wait to leave. Many emigrated.
It wasn’t until Ireland started to become a technologically advanced society that people wanted to live there–and showed it by immigrating to the country.
We don’t want to mimick Cuba in this or any other of its backward policies. No country does. No country should.
Food at the Fore of Cuban Government’s Baby Steps
It’s only taken five decades, and it hardly seems dramatic to outsiders who enjoy daily freedoms, but the Cuban government is finally moving–glacially–to recognize private property and private employment.
In a country where almost everyone works for the communist state, dairy farmer Jesus Diaz is his own boss. He likes it that way — and so does the government.
Living on a plot of land just big enough to graze four dairy cows, Diaz produces enough milk to sell about four quarts a day to the state.
This is independent production on a tiny scale, but it has proved so efficient that Cuba has decided on a major expansion of its program to distribute underused and fallow farmland to private farmers and cooperatives.
More here. IMO, a regime that’s ruined its citizens’ lives for half a century doesn’t deserve any credit for finally accepting the obvious. Learn about the guy at the top of the list of probably billions of people who could have told Cuba so here.
