Cubans Line up for Chance to Use Idle State Land

Will Weissert
Associated Press
HAVANA September 17, 2008


Yenisel Rodriguez is a city-dwelling, 27-year-old anthropologist with zero experience working the land. But he thinks taking up urban farming could put more food on his table, and so he lined up Wednesday to ask Cuba's communist government for permission to try it himself.

"I saw the announcement on TV and that motivated me," Rodriguez said. "I don't have experience. I'm hoping they can tell me what to plant and where."

Cuba has begun accepting applications from private farmers and ordinary citizens like Rodriguez, hoping they'll put idle government land to better use than state planners have. It's part of a campaign by President Raul Castro to revive an agricultural sector crippled by decades of government mismanagement.

Landless Cubans can apply for about 33 acres (13 hectares), while productive farmers can increase their holdings to 100 acres (40 hectares) of state land. Officials pushed up the first day to apply after Hurricanes Gustav and Ike roared through Cuba, dealing a serious blow to food production.

Rodriguez, in his polo shirt and Mercedes-Benz baseball cap, stood out in a crowded government office in the Arroyo Naranjo district of southeastern Havana, where applicants in cowboy hats and mud-caked boots waited their turn.

He said he plans to farm in the evenings after his research shift at Cuba's Anthropology Institute, growing only enough to feed his family.

But Cuba will need thousands of farmers to produce much more than that in order to reduce food imports expected to cost the government US$2 billion this year.

While thousands of small farmers kept their plots after Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and still grow much of Cuba's food, the bureaucrats who took over large farms have made a mess of things: 55 percent of Cuba's arable land went underused last year, and on state farms, just 29 percent was actively used, the government said.

Cuba has not said how much land it will redistribute. Gilberto Zayas, Arroyo Naranjo's land control delegate, said most of those who want land will likely get it, but that inexperience is a major strike against applicants.

"It's obvious that we are going to take those with more experience," Zayas said. "What the country needs is willingness first, but also know-how."

Even if Rodriguez is allowed to try his hand at farming, most of what he produces will not go to his family. Zayas said farmers getting new land will be required to sell almost everything they produce to the state. In cases of simple subsistence farming, typically 80 percent of overall output goes to the government, he said.

Still, Rodriguez remains hopeful, saying he has brothers, uncles and neighbors who will help him out.

The state will provide seeds and fertilizer, a machete and watering tools to program participants. Private farmers can get concessions of up to 10 years, renewable for another 10. Cooperatives and companies can have renewable 25-year terms.

Zayas said the government will encourage those receiving new land to graze milk cows or plant fast-growing, leafy vegetables like lettuce, which thrive in Cuba's mild climate but are nonetheless hard to find here.

"What we need is production, no matter where it comes from," he said. "If the state had the necessary means, we wouldn't be going through this process."

Juan Corales, a 60-year-old retired police officer who said he spent all his life working a small family plot, asked permission Wednesday to raise pigs, goats and chickens on a tract of land near the corner of 100th Street and Flores Avenue in Havana.

"This is the best thing the state could have done," said Corales, a self-described hick.

"There is a lot of land, and lots of people who want to work," he said. "But before, there was always fighting and bureaucracy that made everything difficult."