Cuba's Green revolution

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba almost overnight lost its main trading partner and beneficiary. Cuba got most of its oil from the Soviet Union, which also bought most Cuban sugar cane. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Cuban economy was in free fall. In a sense, the small island nation experienced its very own version of "peak oil". "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil" is a documentary about how Cuba dealt with the crisis, known as The Special Period in Cuban political parlance. The film is produced by a group called Community Solutions, and takes a broadly pro-Cuban (pro-Castro) position. Despite this, the documentary is interesting.

The main message of "The Power of Community" is that decentralization, local initiative, organic farming and renewable energy is the way to survive the coming oil/energy crisis. In Cuba, the oil shortage was dealt with by car pooling, importing or producing large amounts of bicycles, rebuilding large vehicles into buses for public transit, and using horses and mules. Alternative energy sources utilized included solar power and biofuels. 30% of Cuba's energy needs come from the latter.

The most dramatic change came in agriculture, with a shift from large-scale, state-run farms dependent on oil, chemical fertilizers and pesticides to substantially smaller farms utilizing organic methods. Many of the new farms were urban gardens, tended by people living in nearby neighbourhoods.

The documentary describes the new farms as "local cooperatives with a high degree of privatization and autonomy" and claims that 40% of the state-owned farms were divided into "privately owned cooperatives". I'm not entirely sure whether this is really the case, though. The film itself contradicts the claim of privatization when stating that the farmers were allowed to lease land on a usufruct basis. This, of course, is not private ownership.

However, it would seem that many government regulations were scrapped. For instance, the cooperatives were allowed to sell their surplus (minus the government quota) at local private markets. According to "The Power of Community", this led to a substantial increase in production. It also implies that the cooperatives were voluntary, and that farmers joined them because of the chance to make a (modest) profit. The documentary-makers also describe how the new organic farms voluntary shared their food with old people's homes, schools, day care centres, etc.

However, it seems not *everything* is good and well in Cuba. One interviewee admits that the country did use oil even during its Special Period: the low-quality, crude oil found locally was burned in power plants, causing an increase in pollution. "The Power of Community" also admits that food rationing still exists in the country. What the movie doesn't mention is that Cuba really has a two-tier economy, with a dollar-based tourist sector as a "capitalist" complement to the quasi-Green socialism of the main economy. This has arguably increased inequality rather than the reverse. Nor does the documentary ever mention the salient fact that Cuba is a one-party state. Surely the state and the Communist Party play some kind of role in the organic revolution, be it positive or negative? Note also that Cuba has begun to revert to its old ways, due to a new foreign beneficiary with large oil reserves: the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez.

Despite these shortcomings, I nevertheless consider "The Power of Community" to be a good introduction to what could happen even in a Western nation in the event of a severe oil shortage, and what possible consequences and adaptations might follow from it. The bottom line is that future sustainability is dependent on strong, resilient communities with a high degree of mutual solidarity, but also on the liberation of local initiative and local markets from centralized constraints. However, the documentary (perhaps inadvertently) also shows that the crisis might lead to centralized food rationing, increased pollution due to inefficient energy sources and a quick reversal to non-sustainability at the first signs that the crisis might be "over"...