Senior Cuban officials have provided an increasingly dire snapshot of a deepening economic crisis in a series of televised prime-time appearances, revealing the extent of the downturn in unprecedented detail.
Most of their farm land is devoted to cash crops, tobacco, coffee, sugar, the trifecta of colonial slavery. They still run steam trains on sugar cane farms on the west side of the island, there’s ancient soviet tractors working the fields too.
To add on to what you said, a lot of their farm equipment is either Soviet, made like you said, which makes it basically extremely difficult to find replacement parts, or US-made, which also makes it nearly impossible to trade in replacement parts. They often have to leave machines just sitting there or switch to old-school animals.
Oil to run their machines is also extremely difficult to get a hold of because of things like the embargo, since they try to stop other country’s ships from trading with them. They were able to make a deal with Venezuela, and Russia to a lesser extent, that helped, but not enough to meet demand, and it’s been even more difficult since they’ve dealt with sanctions and crises of their own. Mexico is now helping, too, in defiance of the US so hopefully that helps, but it’s difficult and complicated to trade around the regulations with both the US and Cuba. They also don’t have much equipment or foreign expertise to refine received crude oil.
The sanctions also make the country generally poorer, making it difficult to pay for traded food.
Other colonized states that focused on cash crops for hundreds of years generally deal with the same issues: Puerto Rico imports 85% of its food, for example. Jamaica gets 43% of its food imports from the US (imagine if they emmargoed Jamaica with those statistics). Haiti imports 80-90% of its rice and wheat (a staple foods for them). Fiji produces about half the food their population needs. Some of these countries are trying to change it and have ongoing or new agricultural programs, but if you already have the infrastructure and trading partners for your cash crops (like sugar or whatever) from your colonized days, I guess it must be hard to switch over.
Most of their farm land is devoted to cash crops, tobacco, coffee, sugar, the trifecta of colonial slavery. They still run steam trains on sugar cane farms on the west side of the island, there’s ancient soviet tractors working the fields too.
To add on to what you said, a lot of their farm equipment is either Soviet, made like you said, which makes it basically extremely difficult to find replacement parts, or US-made, which also makes it nearly impossible to trade in replacement parts. They often have to leave machines just sitting there or switch to old-school animals.
Oil to run their machines is also extremely difficult to get a hold of because of things like the embargo, since they try to stop other country’s ships from trading with them. They were able to make a deal with Venezuela, and Russia to a lesser extent, that helped, but not enough to meet demand, and it’s been even more difficult since they’ve dealt with sanctions and crises of their own. Mexico is now helping, too, in defiance of the US so hopefully that helps, but it’s difficult and complicated to trade around the regulations with both the US and Cuba. They also don’t have much equipment or foreign expertise to refine received crude oil.
The sanctions also make the country generally poorer, making it difficult to pay for traded food.
Other colonized states that focused on cash crops for hundreds of years generally deal with the same issues: Puerto Rico imports 85% of its food, for example. Jamaica gets 43% of its food imports from the US (imagine if they emmargoed Jamaica with those statistics). Haiti imports 80-90% of its rice and wheat (a staple foods for them). Fiji produces about half the food their population needs. Some of these countries are trying to change it and have ongoing or new agricultural programs, but if you already have the infrastructure and trading partners for your cash crops (like sugar or whatever) from your colonized days, I guess it must be hard to switch over.