THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XI, Issue # 88, March 23, 2009
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
CUBANS STARVE ON DIET OF LIES
By Dennis T. Avery
THE CUBAN ECONOMY & FAILURE OF ORGANIC AGRICULTURE IN CUBA: EXPOSURE OF THE CUBAN ORGANIC
FARMING HOAX, A
DECEPTION AIDED BY THE "USEFUL IDIOTS" AMONG ENVIRONMENTALISTS IN THE NON-COMMUNIST WORLD -- HOW
CASTRO'S SYSTEM DESTROYED CUBAN AGRICULTURE & BROUGHT STARVATION TO MANY CUBANS -- THE GREENS AS
DISSEMINATORS OF CUBAN COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA INTENDED TO COVER UP THE ORGANIC FARMING FAILURE
FULL STORY:
“Cuba’s Urban Farming Program a Stunning Success,”
Associated Press, International Herald Tribune,
June 8, 2008.
“Cuba Organic Farming Group Wins Alternative Nobel
Prize,” Organic Consumers Association press release,
October 6,1999
“Cut Off From Global Markets, Cuba Invents a New
Agriculture,” Donella Meadows, lead author of
Limits to Growth, 1997.
“This is the largest conversion from conventional to
organic or even semi-organic farming the world has
ever seen. . . . The whole world should learn from
Cuba,” Peter Rosset, Executive Director, Food First,
1993.
The Cubans told the world they had heroically learned to feed themselves without fuel or farm chemicals after their
Soviet subsidies collapsed in the early 1990s. They bragged about their “peasant cooperatives,” their biopesticides
and organic fertilizers. They heralded their earthworm culture and the predator wasps they unleashed on destructive
caterpillars. They boasted about the heroic ox teams they had trained to replace tractors.
Organic activists swooned all over the world.
Now, a senior Ministry of Agriculture official has admitted in the Cuban press that 84 percent of Cuba’s current food
consumption is imported, according to our agricultural attaché in Havana. The organic success was all a lie — a great,
gaudy, Communist-style Big Lie of the type that dictators behind the Iron Curtain routinely used throughout the Cold
War to hornswoggle the Free World.
This time, the victims of the Big Lie are the Greens in the organic movement, environmentalists who want us to trust
our future food supplies to their low-yield “natural farming” The Greens, or environmentalists, want us to outlaw
nitrogen fertilizer, biotechnology, and whatever else might save room for the planet’s wildlife through higher farm
productivity.
But, now, the Cubans have admitted sneaking rice, wheat, corn, and soy oil imports into the country, bought with
tourist dollars from European and Canadian visitors — many of whom came to see Cuba’s “stunningly successful”
farming-of-the-future. As the U.S. embargos have loosened, food imports from the U.S.A. are also increasing.
The Cuban farming deception was aided by the “useful idiots” in the non-Communist world. The late Donnella
Meadows, who wrote the stunningly foolish book Limits to Growth in 1972, gushed over Cuban farming:
“Suddenly deprived of half its food and most of its
agricultural inputs, [Cuba] has not only maintained
but increased its food supply in a way that creates
jobs and improves the environment.”
Right, by importing 84 percent of the food.
Cuba has lots of unused farmland, but Castro’s system discouraged rural farmers. They couldn’t get their
over-quota surplus to the cities, for lack of fuel and trucks. Much of Cuba’s rural land has now grown up to
thorny marabou bushes.
Instead, more than 10,000 Cuban city dwellers have become full-time gardeners. Environmentalist Bill McKibbon
wrote in Harpers of a few-acre urban garden in Havana, on a site intended for a hospital. It grows 25
different vegetables, employing 64 people. Most of the beans and carrots have to be delivered to the government
for the “ration stores,” but the gardeners can make their own deals with the neighbors for the rest. The gardeners
only make about 150 pesos per month. Still, there’s even less to buy in Cuba than in the old Soviet Union —
including almost no meat and little milk. They mainly subsist on rice and beans.
Should America force its people to spend their days’ hand-weeding vegetables in a field that should have been a
hospital? Should our food be rationed like Cuba’s? Instead, 3 percent of Americans grow the food, on far less
expensive land.
As Blake Hurst concluded in his March 23, 2009, Weekly Standard article, “Dirt Poor in the Workers’
Paradise,”
“If you are going to have a sustainable agricultural
paradise, it helps to have a nearby neighbor with a
million or so industrial farmers.”
SOURCES:
Peter Rosset, “Organic Farming in Cuba,” multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1994mmll94_06.html
“Cut off from Global Markets, Cuba Invents a New Agriculture: www.pcdf.org/Meadows/cuba.htm
“Havana Ag Outlook and Situation Report” USDA Foreign Ag. Service, Dec, 2008
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Agriculture, the Economy, & Human Health & Welfare:
Policy Issues Relating to Food Production & Consumption
Political Environmentalism Versus Human Progress & Prosperity:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Latin America -- Economics, Politics, Political Regimes,
& Relations with the United States of America:
Problems & Opportunities for the U.S.A.
Communism: Longterm Enemy of the U.S.A. & Its Allies
Dennis T. Avery is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.
He was formerly a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of
Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years. Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville,
Virginia, 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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Conservative Government Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity