MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Cuba renews attempt to boost farm production and cut food import bill

Raúl Castro wants cities surrounded by small urban farms ran by private citizens

Cuban President Raul Castro has announced a five-year plan that he hopes will ease the country's economic problems and reliance on food imports. Basically the agricultural reform this time will be to surround cities with small urban farms so private citizens can raise animals and grow fruits and vegetables.

While Castro has firmly stated that he has no plans to make broad changes to the socialist government, these small initiatives would seem to be signaling a move away from the collectivist agriculture that some critics believe is forcing the fertile island to import about 70% of its food.

Cuba has huge swaths of unused land left over from giant sugar cane farms that went fallow after the end of Soviet subsidies.

“The land is there waiting for our sweat,” Castro said in a speech in July.

The new plan will rely on small producers working unused suburban land with organic methods. The pilot program will take place in the suburbs of Camagüey, Cuba's third-largest city, and government experts expect it to provide the city of 320,000 people with about 75% of its food.

Raul Castro has been a proponent of encouraging domestic development since the fall of the Soviet Union and has previously leased large amounts of land to private farmers, saying beans were more important than cannons.

When Raul Castro formally took power from his ailing brother Fidel in 2006, many hoped that he would bring a new era of progressive reform. Early on, he said he would actively encourage discussions of Cuba's shortcomings in universities, but over the past few years he has been accused of beating, imprisoning and torturing political dissenters.
Brian Latell of the University of Miami, author of “After Fidel: Raul Castro and the Future of Cuba's Revolution”, doubts that the president will have much success moving toward liberalizing the centralized economy.

The government continues to run a monopoly on most food production in the country. Previous attempts to reform the agricultural economy have failed, so many citizens remain skeptical that this new round will be any different.