Cuba: A World Ecological Power

Cuba is the first country in the world to attempt to restructure its society along ecological lines. This decision was partly a result of urgent necessity, partly the result of conviction and partly a retrospective realization that that is what they were doing for a variety of short-term reasons. For instance urban gardens were being developed to grow food, but city planners see it also as part of a process of ruralization or humanization of city life. The ecology movement expects that those who have adopted ecological measures reluctantly when they had no alternative will be converted before the "special period" is over and that the new way of doing things will become a permanent part of Cuban socialism. The bicyclization of Cuba was an emergency measure due to fuel shortages cutting back on urban bus service, but is increasingly regarded as desirable for health and social relations.

This is a unique event, both on the world scene as a whole and in the history of socialism. It therefore warrants close study.

The major change in the orientation of development strategy which is now taking place requires a complex analysis that rejects the dichotomy of "internalist" and "externalist" explanation. It cannot be fully understood as a response to "necessity." There is no rule which states that societies respond effectively to "necessity." What is perceived as necessary and what the domain of potential alternatives includes are both determined by a social context that has to be specified. What makes an alternative available or potentially acceptable is not quite the same as what makes the case for that alternative convincing.

Nor can we explain the changes as the replacement of bad ideas by better ones, as if life is an epiphenomenon in the history of ideas. There is no rule that states that good ideas are more acceptable than bad ones. Nor would such an explanation account for why good ideas are developed at all, why they are ignored for decades and then suddenly become acceptable and even obvious, or how a general orientation can become a program for practice.

My thesis is that in the absence of economic interests in commoditizing agricultural technology, ecological rationality is not only compatible with the economy but a necessary aspect of it.

Some Background

First it is necessary to make some general observations about Cuba as of this writing in May 1993.

1. It is not true that Cuba, or its government, or Fidel Castro are refusing to change. Cuba has been undergoing rapid change since the middle 1980s. It is described as resisting change only because the changes are not those adopted by eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union or insisted upon by the World Bank. Indeed the changes are in the opposite direction, moving further away from capitalism by making production more directly determined by national needs rather than either by profit or by narrow indices of performance.

2. Cuba is not a "just" society. But it is the most just, egalitarian and humane society in the "South" and in some ways in the whole world. Cuba is not free of racism. But racist segregation was abolished immediately in 1959, anti-racist education is part of the consciousness-forming process, recognition of Cuba as an Afro-Caribbean culture has largely replaced hispanophilia, solidarity with Africa is deeply felt and was expressed in strong support for the alliance with Angola. Black people are visible in leading positions as heads of laboratories, institutes, enterprises and organizations, and affirmative action in recent years reflects a commitment not to wait passive for cultural evolution to wipe out the vestiges of discrimination.

Cuba is not a feminist society. But the commitment to full equality has resulted in equal access to education and employment, the entry of women into leading roles in the professions and politics. The family code which proclaims equal rights and obligations did not destroy sexism but is an instrument supporting the struggle for equality within the home. Issues of sexism are themes of popular movies and widespread discussion, and affirmative action in government and the Communist Party are challenging the underrepresentation of women. The Federation of Cuban Women is evolving from being the representative of the revolution among women to also struggling for women's needs in the ongoing revolution.

The rights to health care, education, housing, access to cultural and recreational facilities, employment (or compensation when, as now, shortages of fuel or raw materials force the closing of enterprises) have been recognized as basic human rights limited only by material resources.

The limiting factors on further development along these lines are the economic crisis and the sense of being besieged. There have been incidents of violent intolerance for divergent opinion. The law is vague on the boundary between dissent and counterrevolutionary activity, and the role of the United States in attempting to use "human rights" issues as an anti-revolutionary weapon serves to discredit legitimate criticism.

3. Cuba is not "a democracy," but Cuban democracy is evolving. Its goal is the mobilization of the collective intelligence for solving commonly perceived problems rather than the structuring of dissent. This is occurring through decentralization of planning, more active investigative journalism, the encouragement of whistle blowing to expose corruption in state enterprises, and widespread discussion in countless meeting and informally. It is also occurring through the more direct selection of the legislature through non-partisan (not one-party) elections, a greater role for the Peoples' Assemblies, formation of local organs of self-government at the neighborhood level (Consejos Populares) and greater independence of the mass organizations.

The elections of 1993 were in the nature of a referendum on the revolution, with over 85% of the eligible voters supporting the nominated candidates in spite of widespread dissatisfaction with the efficiency of various ministries and criticism of particular policies.

But these developments coexist with an excessive deference toward the leadership and in many cases an intolerance of any criticisms that seem to be breaking ranks in a time when unity is so urgent.

4. Cuba is not Castro. Although Fidel has the greatest influence on event of any Cuban, there is a collective leadership which runs the country and has overruled him on occasion. Fidel's role is contradictory. His direct personal intervention in policy matters has usually been in the direction of greater boldness and innovation, against bureaucratic stodginess and dependence on rigid formulas. Some of these interventions are as spontaneous as they are later presented as being, but others are only announcements of the culmination of long processes of discussion. But the fact that it is Fidel who does it encourages an uncritical attitude toward leadership.

5. There is much complaining and dissatisfaction in Cuba, as there must be with life so incredibly hard. But Cubans looking at eastern Europe do not want to go that way; they look at Miami and see emigres salivating to return and reclaim their power and property, and do not want that way. They see themselves within the so-called developing world and realize that capitalism in Cuba would not be like Paris but like Santo Domingo. So most criticism is not aimed at a restoration of capitalism.

6. My sense is that in a population of 10-11 million there are hundreds of thousands who have internalized the revolution to the extent that it is a determining consideration in the personal decisions that they make in daily life. Some millions more are struggling every day to meet their own immediate needs but support the revolution, voted for it and would defend it. A significant minority are apathetic, vaguely pro-revolution but mostly waiting to see what will happen, and a smaller minority are passively or actively counterrevolutionary.

7. The Cuban economy had been closely integrated with that of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Prices were stable, based on long-term averages of world prices but departing from those in favor of the less-developed members of the bloc. Especially important was the stable exchange of sugar for oil. Although Ché Guevara criticized these trade relations as too tied to the world capitalist market, they were much more fair than the traditional center/periphery exchange of the global economy. It is this relative fairness that is often described as Soviet subsidies.

Although sugar remains one of the major earners of foreign exchange, Cuba is not a one-product economy. Cubans produce a wide variety of industrial products including computer keyboards, software, batteries, high-grade construction cement, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology products, [ADD] and have designed agricultural tools, diagnostic equipment, and many other products.

8. Eighty percent of Cuban farmland is in some 400 state farms with appointed administrators, 15% of the land is in farmers' cooperatives and about 5% in individual private farms. Cooperatives are formed on a voluntary basis; there was never any coerced collectivization in Cuba.

Scientific Background

In colonial and semi-colonial times (that is, up to 1959) Cuban science had the typical pattern of mixed- and under-development. There had been active systematic biology since Spanish times, with some outstanding work in natural history. This was carried out mostly by isolated individuals, both amateur and professional. There was narrowly applied agricultural experimentation at the staton founded by the sugar producers. And there was medical research. The Agricultural Research Station, later to become the Instituto Nacional de Investigación Fundamental en Agricultura Tropical (INIFAT) was a center of research in spite of irregular support subjection to corrupt administrators and harassed both for its support of its striking workers and because of its opposition to the various dictatorial regimes that variously seized power by election or coup

Cubans are proud of scientists such as Fernando Poey in natural history, Carlos Zayas and Pastor Aguayo in entomology, Bruner, Tomás Roig and Julian Acuña in agriculture, Carlos Finlay and Pedro Kouri in medicine.

From its earliest days, the revolutionary government gave high priority to science. There are now thousands of scientists working in diverse areas of research for medicine, agriculture, industry, education, culture, philosophy and other areas. A report by the Cuban Academy of Sciences to the National Assembly of People's Power a few years ago listed 166 research centers. Cuban scientists have been active in the international scientific community. Their contribution to the International Biological Program was a study of the montane rain forest in the Sierra de Rosario which transformed a collection of systematic zoologists and botanists into ecologists confident of themselves and increasingly outspoken on the need for ecological input into development plans. This early commitment to science made possible the present turning toward ecology. Later milestones included the first national ecology conference in 1980, which called for the Council on Natural resources and the Environment (COMARNA) to have enforcement power, and in 1987 the merging of the institutes of zoology and botany into the Institute of Ecology and Systematics. In 1990, a workshop on agroecology decided to establish a non-governmental network of ecologists to by-pass bureaucratic inertia.

The major ideological obstacle to an ecological approach to agriculture has been the progressivist, developmentalist ideology. This viewpoint, a very common liberal insertion into Marxist thought, holds that progress takes place along a single axis from less developed to more developed and that therefore the task of the less developed is to become more developed more or less in the same way that Europe and North America developed: passing from labor-intensive to capital-intensive technology, from small scale to large scale units of production, from heterogeneity to homogeneity in agriculture, from diversity of production to regional and local specialization, from subjection to nature to control over nature, from the generalized agricultural skills of the farmer to the narrow specialization of technicians, from peasant knowledge (now labeled "superstition") to scientific knowledge. One outcome of this process has been the growing sophistication of science in the small, at the level of the laboratory and the individual research problem, and a growing irrationality at the level of the scientific enterprise as a whole (Levins 1986).

This developmentalist view is nearly universal in capitalist countries and dominated Soviet and east European thinking, especially during the Brezhnev era. Naive and uncritical expectations were laid n "the scientific-technological revolution" and on economic and managerial methods to make production more efficient. It was widely believed that capitalist methods were socially neutral. The could be removed from their capitalist context and made to server socialist ends. They shared Stalin's notion that once the general political line was established it could be ignored, and all depended on administration.

By the middle 1980s, there was a growing dissatisfaction in Cuba with the Soviet model and a renewed interest in the economic and political ideas of Ernesto Ché Guevara. This carried with it a repoliticalization of Cuban life which the Cubans referred to as "rectification." It had widespread repercussions in many areas of Cuban life. It was also important for science, encouraging a more Marxist and less liberal view of the history of science.

A Marxist analysis of science emphasizes the following:

1. Science s a social product. Its methods, ideas, problems, theories, organization, recruitment, patterns of knowledge and ignorance and modes of practical application result from the kind of society that supports it. Therefore its trajectory is not a natural unfolding of generic human knowledge but a result of who owns the knowledge industries,, what the owners require of it and how they go about assuring that these needs are met. It depends on how scientists are recruited (the leading positions mostly from middle- and upper-class white males, the supporting roles from women, working class, oppressed nationalities and races), trained and rewarded. It depends on the ideology of the scientific community, its insertion both into world science and national politics. And it is a locus of struggle among conflicting interests and beliefs.

2. Since its origins in 17th century Europe, modern "western" science has been closely linked to capitalist development. Its major priorities have been the development of technologies that could be turned into commodities, the ideological justification of existing social relations (capitalism, imperialism, elitism, individualism, competitiveness, sexism and racism). Its belief system bas been that of liberalism in the broad sense, and its philosophy positivist and reductionist. Therefore revolutionary scientists have to challenge the dominate modes of thought within science. Our relationship to world science cannot be one of passive consumption, admiration and emulation, but a combination of participation and criticism.

3. In the scientific study of nature and society, process has priority over "things," which can best be understood as moments of process. In the course of their development, processes often cross thresholds and change qualitatively. Things are the way they are because they got that way, not because they always were or have to be, so that the history of a phenomenon is crucial to its understanding. The categories we use to divide up the world for study are our own creations. They are sometimes justifiable in the short run but are always misleading eventually because they freeze processes into snapshots of themselves and make false dichotomies where there is interpenetration. The objects and processes of interest can only be understood in their context of interrelations, interpenetrations and processes so that narrow specialization for reasons of"efficiency" will eventually lead to basic misunderstanding.

The implication for socialism of this dialectical approach is that science should not develop by passively emulating Euro-North American science in its structure, priorities or intellectual framework. And indeed in some ways Cuban science was different from the beginning.

It was taken for granted that science should serve the needs of society, that it was a collective enterprise, and that the collective includes researchers, maintenance workers, office workers, research assistants and administrators. It was assumed that land use was to be determined not by real estate values but by human need. The "humanization of work" was one of the long-term themes on the agenda of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. It was also a humane enterprise. Research schedules were flexible, often adapted to the child care and health needs of participants.

But it also struggled with the contradictory demands for having a planned science and yet preserving the flexibility necessary for innovation and initiative, for making the best use of available material resources by centralized allocation according to nationally set priorities, and the best use of intellectual resources by leaving he direction of the various sciences to those who are doing the work. What evolved was a system in which the government appointed the top leadership of the Academy of Sciences which in turn allocated the budget among institutes. The working scientists helped set the national goals. Then each institute took up those of the national goals that were relevant to it when it drew up it's own five-year plan.

The net result was the rapid and imaginative growth of Cuban science in many fields, both encouraged and inhibited by the centralized structure.

the most difficult part was freeing itself from the intellectual domination and excessive deference toward "world science" and its technological products. As late as the middle 1980s it was still possible for Fidel (in his speech at the inauguration of the Celia Sanchez Mandulay textile factory) to cite a four-fold increase in pesticide use as one of the achievements of the revolution.

On the whole, the Marxist critique of science was a secondary theme, subordinated to the more familiar Marxist themes of anti-imperialism, class struggle, the practical and theoretical priority of production, the importance of planning and of solidarity in the face of capitalist hostility.

In the Soviet Union, ecology was well developed at the start of the revolution. Far-sighted ecologically-oriented legislation was introduced as early as 1924 and pollution standards were among the most stringent in the world. In the 1930s, a group of Afro-American agriculturalists settled in Uzbekestan and warned against the highly-chemicalized monoculture scheme for the expansion of cotton production that has proven so disastrous to the region.

But the leadership of the Soviet government and Party was committed to the high-tech path of development; leaders of industry disregarded regulations which interfered with fulfillment of their plans; and criticism of policy was treated as disloyal. Ecology, deprived of the opportunity to engage with development policy, languished as a science. The results were devastating.

Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union, Cuban scientists did not feel inhibited from challenging national science policies. At one time the Institute of Botany refused to work with the Forestry Institute on its plan for terracing mountainsides planting monocultures of teak of hibiscus, and clear-cutting the trees. They saw the plan as too vulnerable to pest problems and provoking massive erosion. At the first national ecology conference in 1980, they debated pesticide use and passed resolutions calling for enforcement powers for COMARNA, the Council on the Environment and Natural Resources. (COMARNA has since been elevated to cabinet status, and now any new development project requires approval by ecological, economic and logistical reviewers).

The Institute of Ecology and Systematics was formed from the merger of the former Institutes of Botany and Zoology and immediately began to make ecological concerns more visible.

The National Institute for Research in Citrus and Other Fruits was committed early to ecological agriculture, and the whole industry was already in a five-year plan to replace pesticides before the Special Period.

The National Institute for Plant Protection, The Center for Animal and Plant Health, the Instituto Superior de Ciencias Agropecuarios de Havana, INIFAT, and various universities joined in emphasizing ecological approaches to agriculture. Ecologists discussed how to push for change, how to make their case at national conferences through their Union, the Communist Party, and in other ways. One local Party club successfully challenged a decision of the Central Committee that would have evaded legal protection of a national resource.

Throughout this process, my friends and colleagues never doubted their right and obligation to push for ecologically rational policies although they were sometimes doubtful that they would be heard. We had many discussions about how to meet the criticisms that opposition to the high-tech pathway was opposition to development per se and that ecological imperatives were "idealistic."

Research on ecological methods of pest management continued, with a few dramatic success stories such as the use of ants in the protection of bananas and sweet potatoes from insect damage. Finally in the late 1980s, biological control was adopted as a national policy by the Ministry of Agriculture.

Thus a Marxist critique of developmentalism was already present and familiar when the Special Period made it an urgent necessity overnight.

The Special Period

The Cuban economy suffered a devastating blow with the collapse of the socialist trading bloc. Some 80% of its trade had been with other members of that group and most of its fuel oil came from the Soviet Union. Feed for cattle and poultry was imported from east Germany, and integrated industrial production meant that spare parts for all sorts of machines came from other bloc members.

Two other circumstances made that abrupt loss of economic ties especially disruptive. The United States intensified its efforts to starve Cuba into submission through its own economic embargo against Cuba and the attempts to impose these biases on other countries through the Torricelli Act. A general shift to the right in many countries formerly friendly to Cuba undermined resistance to U.S. pressure. Furthermore the world (capitalist) recession made it difficult to find markets for Cuban products. In Miami, emigres were selling off their assets in order to be ready to return to Cuba and take over when the society collapsed.

But it didn't collapse. People are not starving; shortage is shared equitably (for instance milk is once again rationed with priority for small children), health service remains among the best in the world; and you do not see homeless children roaming the streets of Havana as they do in Lima. Despite incredible hardships of daily life and frustrating inefficiencies often caused by the sense of urgency, Cuba has responded to the economic blows with tenacity and incredible creativity. One aspect of this response is ecological: the ecologists by conviction are being joined by ecologists by necessity. This shows up in everything from the bicyclization of urban transport to ecological technologies in agriculture to development of solar and wind energy to geographic planning. In agriculture the major directions are:

1. Geographic diversification. Each region is producing a wide diversity of crops to meet its own needs, and each crop is produced in widely separated regions. This offers protection against the uncertainties of weather and economizes on transport. Diversity within a region also stabilizes the demand for labor. Municipal gardens help meet the needs for vegetable production but also contribute in the long run to a ruralization of the city, a humanization of the environment.

2. Within-farm diversification. This began with the plots of "autoconsumo" to feed the farm's own work force. But it also responds to the possibilities of making better use of local microclimate variation, improves crop protection, allows for recycling with the farm (e.g. manure from the dairy produces biogas and goes into the vegetable seedbeds, nectar sources in the pasture support natural enemies of fruit crops, residues from raising pigs feed fish, sugar cane is mashed with yeast to produce feed). And it permits agronomic interactions among crops including attraction and maintenance of predators, repelling of pests, shading, complementary nutrient needs, nitrogen fixation, etc.) Eventually there will not be separate cane farms, dairies of citrus projects but mixed farming enterprises.

3. Biofertilizers. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil and in the roots of legumes are widely used to replace chemical fertilizers. Cuba leads the world in the study and use of mycorrhizae, fungi that live in association with the roots of many kinds of plants and function as auxiliary roots in the mobilization of minerals. Composting, applications of manure, the raising of earthworms and recycling of residues all work to reduce external inputs into the farm.

4. Biological crop protection, including mixed cropping, provision of habitats for natural enemies of pests, production of parasitic wasps and insect diseases against major pest species, the use of trap crops and repellants, rotation of crops, and more fundamentally the design of complex agro-ecosystems that are as self-operating as possible.

5. Reduced need for irrigation water by better use of water resources, improved moisture holding capacity of the soil through the buildup of organic matter, reforestation to improve regional water flow, and erosion control.

6. Rotational pasturing (the Voisin system) and renewed interest in native breeds of free-running chickens marks a departure from the enclosed animal factory dependent on inputs of feed.

7. Reduced use of heavy machinery with the reintroduction of animal traction and with strategies of soil management that make heavy tractors necessary [unnecessary?]

8. Restructuring of farm work. The diversification of production within the state farms would make the already-difficult tasks of management impossible within the norms of top-down administration. The coordination of a large number of tasks simultaneously and the need to adapt gentle technologies in a site-specific way require a high degree of self-organization and autonomy for the farm workers. This will help humanize farm work and retain population in the countryside. It is also and important step in democratization at the level of the workplace.

It is expected that these measures, long overdue, will be carried over after the Special Period. [note: he comments in this in 2008 – Talking About Trees]

Conclusions

The commitment of Cuba to develop toward an ecological society was precipitated by the economic emergency of the Special Period. But its roots go further back. The socialist economic model starts with the premise that the use of nature must be the result of conscious choices rather than the outcome of individual profit-seeking behaviors. In the absence of private interests favoring the increased use of external inputs (fertilizers, pesticides) in agriculture, debates about the technological strategy are clashes of opinion, not interest. This makes it possible for the ecological option to win.

The socialist commitment to science created the scientific community with the self confidence and responsibility to agitate for ecological approaches even when the prevailing ideology in the country was a socialist developmentalism that identified progress with the high-tech, capital-intensive, managerial route. It also created the research capacity to prepare practical ways of carrying out an ecological program. And despite often-frustrating encounters with reluctant political/economic leadership overwhelmed with the sense of the urgency to produce, it always had the freedom to express its own viewpoint and to carry out popular education on ecology.

The sympathetic attitude toward Marxist thought provided intellectual tools and receptivity for a critique of developmentalism and a predisposition to favor models of nature that stress interconnection, complexity and process. All of this lead to a vociferous critical perspective even when it could not prevail. Good ideas do not of themselves win over bad ones. But it was crucial that they were available when circumstance made old ways of doing untenable. At that point, the long-term favorable factors of socialism, scientific development and Marxism were able to advance agains an increasingly discredited and ineffective developmentalism.

When I lecture about Cuba, I am often asked, "What will happen next?" or "But can Cuba really survive?"

I cannot answer these questions. Recent history has been full of the unexpected. Even short-term prediction is chancey. But more important, I find the questions too detached, too academic. Prediction for the sake of prediction without leading to action seem inhuman when so much is at stake for people. But if prediction leads to action, the act of predicting itself can change the outcome. Therefore I prefer to respond as a participant/observer in the Cuban revolution and talk about what needs to be done.

As a participant/observer I feel a strong commitment to Cuba and its revolution. In its sharp break with traditional dependent capitalism and its moving away from the oppressive depoliticized European socialism it is an area of hope in a world dominated by [missing word?]. Its successes against such heavy odds are an inspiration and its failings a challenge, because commitment to the revolution does not imply or require approval of all the decisions its leaders make. On the contrary, it is often the obligation to oppose policies and criticize practices.

For friends of the Cuban revolution the most urgent task of the present is to work to lift, limit or thwart the blockade. To do this we have to break the information blockade and refute the misconceptions about Cuba not with utopian fantasies but with description and analysis that respects the complexity of the Cuban process and the intelligence of even the most misinformed Americans. The reward is hope: the possibility of a living alternative to the violence, harsh greed, short-sighted destructiveness, rationalized oppression and cynical despair of the New World Order. The reward is the possibility that when the euphoria of the marketplace triumphant clears away and we can try again to build a just, equitable and sustainable world, we will not have to start from scratch because the Cubans already started.

At present the urgent tasks for Cuba are tasks of production to guarantee food and health care for the next months. But to do this it has to invent not only technique but also organization. Its collective thinking has to catch up with its new practice, it has to find ways of mobilizing further the tremendous ingenuity and energy of the people and to solve technical problems and set creative strategies and run the country. It has to reconcile individual and collective necessities. It has to block the stultifying effects of corruption, greed, opportunism, intolerance and indifference which often dissipate those energies and discourage creativity. It has to reorient its international trade in a way to permit exchange with a world market without being dominated by it. In short, the urgent tasks confronting Cuba is advancing its revolution.

So the answer to the question "can Cuba survive?' is, it will take not one but many miracles to save Cuba, but Cubans and their friends around the world are capable of miracles.