FRFI 205 October / November 2008

Cuba: in the eye of the storm

Between 30 August and 7 September, two Category 4 hurricanes passed through Cuba, wreaking destruction on a mass scale. More than 300,000 homes were damaged, the country’s electricity grid was plunged into chaos and thousands of hectares of crops were destroyed, at a cost of around $5bn. Cuba’s development plans have been set back, but through all the turmoil, Cuba’s organised response shows how socialism is capable of defending human life. LOUIS BREHONY reports.

Hurricane Gustav
Gustav struck Cuba on the afternoon of 30 August. 60,000 people had been evacuated the previous night. Gustav’s 150mph winds damaged or destroyed 90,000 homes and knocked down 80 electricity pylons in Pinar del Rio alone. On the Isle of Youth, the entire electricity grid was brought down. In Cuba no one lost their life to Gustav, but there were 138 deaths in other countries across the Caribbean and the US.

Hurricane Ike
A week later, Hurricane Ike hit. 2.6 million people were relocated, a quarter of Cuba’s population. The heavy rainfall led the Cuyaguateje River to burst its banks, leaving whole towns in western Pinar del Rio cut off.

Seven people were killed as a result of Ike. In the past decade 22 Cubans have been killed by hurricanes. In neighbouring Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, more than 550 people have been killed this hurricane season alone and one million people made homeless.

In the US, the world’s richest country, up to 65 people died when Ike hit. Despite the lessons learned from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when 1,800 people died, and despite warnings from national weather forecasters that residents of coastal Texas faced ‘certain death’ if they refused to evacuate, hundreds of thousands were unable or unwilling to move. Although some buses were laid on for the elderly or disabled or those lacking their own transport, most residents were left to fend for themselves. Severe petrol shortages made this impossible for many; others found themselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams stretching from Houston to northern Texas. When people did reach help, emergency centres were grossly under-resourced. In Galveston, the area worst hit by Ike, 40% of the population did not evacuate. As Newsweek reported (19 September 2008), many were too elderly or infirm to withstand evacuation or too poor to organise it – with no car, no relatives to stay with, no money for a hotel and unable to take extra days off work. Newsweek pointed too to a basic mistrust of the authorities after experiences of other hurricanes – the botched evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005 killed ten times more people than the hurricane itself – and the fear that, as happened after Katrina, if they left they might never be allowed to come back.

Cuba: socialism saves lives
In 2005 Cuba was recognised by the UN’s World Disaster Conference as ‘a model for hurricane management in developing countries’. The conference highlighted strong commitment by public authorities, public awareness enshrined in the education system from primary school up to university level and the involvement of the whole population so that ‘potentially vulnerable populations play an indispensable role in saving other lives and their own’.

This system is overseen by the assemblies of people’s power and the revolutionary armed forces. Each house receives an evacuation plan long in advance, and public evacuation drills are held regularly. Evacuations are ordered 48 hours before storms hit. Schools are immediately turned into shelters, with a doctor in each. Volunteers make sure there are enough blankets, water and food. Hospitals, water pumps and other key services have their own power sources so they can carry on when the grid goes down. This is how socialism protects its people.

Rebuilding despite the blockade
Cuba has a lot of rebuilding to do. 300,000 homes have been affected. Reconstruction work has started on thousands of homes across the island but is hampered by lack of resources. The US government has refused to lift the blockade (see letter from Teresita Trujillo).

Meanwhile, help has been flowing in from Cuba’s allies, including Brazil, Russia, China and Venezuela. $1 million was donated by Trinidad and Tobago, whose ambassador described
Cuba as an ‘example to the rest of the Caribbean’.

POLITICAL SOLIDARITY PRIORITY FOR CUBA

FRFI asked Teresita Trujillo, from the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, how people in Britain can best support Cuba in its reconstruction efforts. We reprint an edited version of her reply.

‘At this point our main priority from friends is political. The US administration is using the situation to mount another campaign against the Revolution. Their offer of humanitarian assistance is conditional on sending a mission to assess the damage. They are presenting the situation as if they were desperate to help and the Cuban authorities are refusing their assistance, while they say nothing about the blockade or about our request to get authorisation (even on temporary basis) to purchase construction materials from the US. Anti-Cuban organisations in the US, such as the Cuban-American National Foundation, are requesting an increase in the amount of money they can send their ‘partners’ in Cuba, and are manipulating the US media to present a picture of the situation that suits their interests.

The US authorities say that the Revolution is incapable of resolving the problems created by the hurricanes and that we are refusing their assessment mission because it will reveal that it was the inefficiency of the system that caused the damage to be so huge.

This is the time for the international community to put pressure on the US administration to end the blockade and to counter the distortions spread by the US. The recovery is going on quite quickly, but obviously part of the damage will have a long-term effect.’
To avoid bank transaction charges, send donations to Rock around the Blockade at BM RATB, London WC1N 3XX and we will forward them to the official Hurricane Damage Restoration account in Cuba. Cheques payable to Rock around the Blockade and marked ‘Hurricane Appeal’.

FRFI 205 October / November 2008

Cuban agriculture: a sustainable path

Roberto Perez, Cuban biologist and permaculturist [permaculture is the study of sustainable, organic, small-scale agricultural production], toured Britain in September with the Permaculture Association to promote Cuba’s achievements in organic agriculture and urban farming. While in Britain, he spoke to FRFI.

FRFI: To what extent can the example of Cuba’s achievements in sustainable agriculture be applied to capitalist countries?
Perez: I believe that capitalist societies are too based on individualism to allow these necessary changes. But as the crisis escalates, people will be forced to organise in this way. There will be no alternative faced with the combined effects of climate change, biofuels and peak oil [when oil reserves begin to run out]. Extreme climatic events – floods, droughts and rising sea levels – will affect everyone. If business as usual continues, it will exhaust resources. This situation cannot be solved with technological gadgets or market solutions. It’s necessary to go down a sustainable path of community-based solutions, social awareness and social justice.

Recent agricultural reforms in Cuba, allowing greater use of land by individuals and families, have been interpreted in the British press as a step towards capitalism. What is going on?
This change is only allowing more people to use land on the basis of usufruct – allowing the use of the fruit to the people that work the land. They are producing food for the people, not to make a lot of profit. Conventional agriculture – using chemicals, heavy machinery, lots of energy – was not guaranteeing the food security that we need under the US blockade. So if right now small producers are more efficient and more sustainable they are also part of the revolution. It’s not capitalism. They are revolutionary people and they are helping the country to go forward.

Cuba currently imports most of its food, and increasing domestic food production has been identified as a priority. Will this limit further gains in sustainable development?
To say we import most of our food does not reflect the reality. Cuba needs to import food for social consumption, such as wheat and other food that we cannot produce because of our tropical climate. But we are producing more food than ever before. We eat a lot of pork and it’s all produced locally. Some cities of Cuba produce 70% of the vegetables that they consume. So we are on the road to self-sustainability, but based on efficiency.

We can’t produce everything in the country because we only have limited arable land and a lot of our land is degraded as a result of capitalist development up to 1959. 85% of the ecosystem was destroyed and this was exacerbated by the conventional agricultural system that was applied between 1965 and 1991. We need to keep a balance between the exports produced in the country, like tobacco, coffee and other products, and what we produce for ourselves. The blockade limits our ability to exchange goods and because of that we have to keep increasing domestic production.

If the price of food keeps increasing it will be very bad, not just for Cuba but for any poor country, because people depend on imports to eat. It could make some governments look for conventional alternatives and use chemicals to increase yields in the short term. I think that after 18 years of success in organic farming and urban farms we need to keep persisting. We have proved that sustainable agriculture can feed millions of people. The sustainable agriculture movement will eventually face a challenge in Cuba, because now we have allies like Venezuela that provide affordable oil and oil products. After the hurricanes we need to recover so I think it will be necessary to have a balance. There needs to be an internal discussion in Cuba.

What effect has the Energy Revolution had on Cuba’s energy security and emissions levels?
Apart from increasing by 10% forest cover above the 1959 level, thereby making our small contribution to having carbon sinks without the big money of the IMF or World Bank, we have engaged in the Energy Revolution. This included the decentralisation of energy generation so that now we don’t depend on big plants for electricity. There are new generators throughout the whole country. They burn oil or diesel, but they are very efficient. They can be switched on or off according to demand and create small closed circuits so that they can guarantee supply after disasters like hurricanes.

We changed all the incandescent bulbs in the country for energy saving bulbs, supplied by the government. People can also change, at affordable prices, their old inefficient fridges, air conditioning and cooking appliances.

The government is committed to powering the more than 100,000 households that are off the grid with renewable energy, so many family doctor clinics and schools in rural areas are solar-powered. Micro-hydro-electricity is promising in the mountains and wind turbines are being installed as the capital needed to set them up becomes available.

What is your view on the use of biofuels in energy generation?
What we are seeing right now are not biofuels, they are agrofuels. Agribusinesses has found a new commodity and they don’t care if people are starving. Cuba’s position is that this will cause hunger for a lot of people. It’s criminal to produce ethanol from cereals like corn because the energy it takes to produce it is more than the energy it will give. Even though Cuba has crops like sugar cane, not one hectare of our land will be used for agrofuels if the food is needed.
Cereal reserves are currently at their lowest level for 40 years, and this practice will make food prices even higher, which is already causing riots for food in some poor countries. You can see how difficult the situation is in Haiti, with people so desperate they are eating mud. If we can use some of the resources that people in rich countries just waste, then we can save a few million people on this planet every year from hunger.