Often, we experience world events as spectators. Outside the immanence of participation, the spectator responds to events as an omniscient force operating under ideal conditions. From the vantage of the spectator, criticism comes from the perspective of an observer unencumbered by the actual state of play. In political debates, a similar situation occurs.

When protests occurred in Cuba beginning on July 11th, 2021, socialists globally staked positions as spectators falling into well-worn tropes. Some criticized the Cuban government, led by the Communist Party of Cuba (pcc), for failures to address economic scarcity and curtail political repression. Others noted the continued role of United States aggression toward Cuba and how the blockade conditioned economic scarcity. At times, both of these positions would be presented within the same article, as if there was a resurrection of the neither/nor Cold War position taken by certain factions within the international socialist movement.

I write now not to stake a position about what any actor in this saga should have or have not done during or prior to the protest. Rather, these words are meant as a call for analysis like that presented in this book, Agrarian History of the Cuban Revolution: Dilemmas of Peripheral Socialism. The ability to opine beyond doxa is based on a theoretically-informed understanding of national and international political economy. This decenters the either/or of causation, either pcc or US, toward a more complex and dynamic explanation of Cuba’s present difficulties.

That is, the spectators should be haunted by the specter of Marx: “[Humans] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Marx’s meaning was clear; humans, organizations, and nation-states are embedded within structures that present opportunities and barriers to change. These structures are historical and material, and therefore people cannot act as if they do not exist, as if they are not real.

Dr. Vasconcelos builds on important theoretical developments in Marxist theory to demonstrate how structural constraints impacted the transition from Cuba’s neocolonial economy centered on the plantation to the post-revolution sovereign economy centered on the state farm. The uneven and combined development of capitalist social relations during the neocolonial period based on the underutilization of surplus extracted by international capital reproduced a technologically-backward, labor-dependent agriculture.

When the Cuban revolutionaries began the process of re-organizing agriculture, they confronted a reality in which the sugar monocrop had been entrenched, internally and externally. To extricate its deep, perennial roots was not a romantic task in which the ideal could be actualized the day after the triumph. The breaking of the plantation did not automatically entail the rise of cooperatives and peasant-based agriculture, because this decision itself could have threatened the overall stability of sovereignty. Although, this was conceived of as an option.

There was an attempt to move agriculture away from sugar beginning in 1959. As Dr. Vasconcelos notes, this was tied into the “small agrarian debate,” ultimately won by the modernizers emphasizing industrial methods of production, state farms, and the export of the sugar monocrop. To be fair, social and ecological conditions lifted a multitude of barriers for supporters of cooperatives and peasant-based agriculture, ultimately dooming their argument by circumstance.

Between 1959 and 1964, there were three hurricanes, a drought, and already exhausted soil fertility. Then, there was a burning through the agricultural surplus, like in beef cattle, a bonanza driven by optimism and hope. Add to this the need to stabilize the balance of payments, increase imports for (agro-)industrialization, and meet Soviet demands for sugar in exchange for oil. So, when Cuban officials attempted to support diversification through policy, they quickly ran out of options to free themselves from sugar, based on the internal class structure that saw a loss of rural proletarians, the external export demands, and the ecological conditions they faced. Officials ideologically committed to agricultural modernization became dominant, leading to the strengthening of sugar once more.

This structural analysis of development, based on a dialectical relation of forces between structure and the agency of historical actors, continues to be important for understanding Cuba today. In the 1990s, the Cuban economy confronted an extreme contraction following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The pain from the loss of Cuba’s main trading partner was compounded by the United States’ strengthening of the decades-long blockade with the ongoing goal of toppling the pcc by starving the Cuban population. Because of this, the Cuban government pivoted toward a tourism-dependent economy and withdrew land from the production of sugar.

Importantly, changing conditions meant alterations in the agrarian structure away from state farms toward cooperatives and peasant-based agriculture. This shift was drastic, with state land in cultivation reduced from more than 80 percent in the 1970s to less than a quarter by the 2000s (Smolski 2022). Cooperatives, like the Basic Unit of Cooperative Production (ubpc), the Credit and Services Cooperatives (ccs), and the Agricultural Production Cooperatives (cpa), along with smallholder, private farmers, came to represent almost 75 percent of land in production. These changes to agriculture were not only forced by external structural circumstances, but made possible by prior structural and institutional changes: the training and professional development of scientists and technicians, the de-commodification of land, the construction of facilities to produce input substitutes, and the maintenance of a mass small farmer organization, the National Association of Small Farmers (anap). The rise of urban agriculture, the increased production of vegetables and fruits, and the application of agroecological and low input agrarian practices all were tied into leveraging this social base.

Once more, the internal and external conditions of Cuba impacted its agrarian trajectory. Decisions that were made prior impacted what decisions could be made as conditions changed. Or, to rely on Dr. Vaconcelos’ conceptual apparatus, the instrumental (means) and substantive (ends) rationalities were brought together to motivate a re-peasantification in order to meet the demand for food under crisis conditions. That was also tied into a resurgent tourism sector that re-introduced the law of value into more parts of everyday life in Cuba.

Now, we arrive at the present. What are the current conditions of Cuba’s agrarian political economy, internally and externally? The Trump Administration not only ended the diplomatic advances put in place by the Obama Administration, officials increased the blockade to intolerable levels. This has meant increasing fuel scarcity, rolling blackouts, lack of necessities for the public healthcare system, and more (Vasconcelos 2021). The covid-crisis exacerbated these economic problems by restricting tourism, along with the ever-worsening economic conditions in Venezuela, Cuba’s main trading partner.

Overall exports have again returned to levels near that of the Special Period in Times of Peace, with 1.966 billion usd in 2021. This means less foreign exchange to cover the cost of imports. Imports are at 8.431 billion usd, buoyed in part by a 19.618 billion usd debt that is increasingly short-term. That debt, amounting to almost 20 percent of gdp in 2020 (World Bank 2022), and need for credit-financed import purchases faces more perilous terrain as the cost of finance increases with the global rise in interest rates. Even more, the Biden Administration has largely eschewed reversals of Trump-era policies, such as maintaining Cuba on the list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” As such, the pcc has little room for maneuver to address the mounting challenges.

In terms of problems for the food system specifically, 1.955 billion usd of food products were imports, accounting for the majority of cereals, poultry, and rice consumed on the island. Long lines and arduous searches for a dignified meal have been an ongoing issue for the Cuban government and population, even during the Soviet period (Benjamin, Collins, and Scott 1984). Garth (2020) notes that it is this struggle to provide a culturally satisfactory meal that leads to increasing levels of frustration, often shouldered by Cuba women. Despite this drudgery, in 2019 Cubans on average were able to obtain 3,375 kcal/capita/day, with 82.59 g/capita/day of protein and 73.08 g/capita/day of fat (fao 2022). There is then a discordance between often challenging conditions of everyday life and the government’s capacity to alleviate them, even if it succeeds in assuring the population does not face conditions of malnourishment or famine.

I return to my premise, that it is much easier to be the spectator occupying a transcendental space above the fray. It is much more difficult to be on the field of immanence, to be within an existing situation and seek to shift the parameters in which people can act. Not impossible, but certainly distinct from having any and all options at your disposal. What should the pcc do within these external constraints? What should anap do? Or the population generally? Considering the legitimacy of demands that were the basis of the protests, a spectator cannot just say, “But, the US,” as if that resolves really existing problems people navigate.

And, to be clear, I am not stating that the pcc is above criticism, as it certainly commits errors. Any person would rightly shake their head at the disastrous idea to achieve a 10,000,000 ton harvest in the 1970 giant zafra to understand how wrong leaders can be. And currently, more could be done to address internal food supply chain issues, such as increasing the production of feed for livestock to support yields of meats and dairy. Rather, criticism must match existing conditions, instead of arguments based on an ideal typical world. It may be cliche, but it is a truism, to know where we are going, we must know where we have been.

In order to understand those conditions, we need the exemplary types of analyses represented in this book. Dr. Vasconcelos’ agrarian history, her careful attention to data, and her utilization of theoretically rich concepts for interpretation provide us tools to analyze for strategic utilization the course of development. By doing so, we can be informed spectators, and from that vantage work within our own everyday spaces to improve global conditions for more just, sustainable worlds.

Andrew R. Smolski

Postdoctoral Research Scholar

Department of Agricultural and Human Sciences

North Carolina State University (ncsu), USA