If for half a century revolutionary Cuba has survived the blockade imposed by the United States and ratified by the rich world in general, among the responses organized by Cubans, apart from preparing themselves militarily well, they have highlighted two: to organize the health system to function in extreme situations and to feed the entire population with dignity.

Cuban agriculture, for its part, has had to overcome the collapse of a centralized cultivation model as much as the blockade of the capitalist powers. Cuba's agriculture was blocked by the failure of the Soviet network around it in the 1990s.

Until then, in 75 per cent of the island's fields sugar cane was being produced seeking the efficiency of industrial cultivation to import 60 per cent of the food in return. Most pesticides, such as half of fertilizers and many livestock feed. Oil also had to be bought from the outside, the tractors, most of the machinery, and then the sugar was exported.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, food imports halved, the Cuban diet drastically decreased: calories by 36%, protein by 40% and fat by 65%. The majority of the population had slimmed down in the early years. The Havana government responded to hunger with food programs for the most vulnerable - the elderly, new mothers, children - and with rationing cards for the population. However, in a similar situation, it continued with a centralized mechanized system and saw its population condemn to hunger, as opposed to North Korea, in Cuba all agriculture was reformed and by 2003 the population’s diet regained 2,470 calories, above the blockade of the gringos, without the help of the World Bank.

In recent years, they have had to abandon oil-based agriculture and change to another model. Farmers have recovered traditional techniques, at the same time as they have learned new technologies and learned to develop and use natural pesticides and ecological fertilizers. Tractors have again been replaced by oxen and cargo beasts. Many sugarcane farms have also been reorganized into smaller farms.

The transformation that has made Cuba a “paradise of agroecology” has been the result of many decisions. In essence, the government of Havana began to decentralize agriculture in the 1990s: to extend autonomy to small guajiros [baserritarras], to legalize new cooperatives, to dismantle inefficient industrial farms, to cede communal lands to new farmers... Many planning and marketing skills are transferred to municipalities.

Miguel A. Altieri and Fernando R. According to Funes-Monzot in the study "Paradoxes of Cuban Agriculture", over 100,000 small farms have been created in a million hectares distributed by the State in recent years. In addition, there are 383,000 urban orchards producing 1.5 million tonnes of vegetables. Among all, the use of the “Special Period” 73% fewer chemicals has allowed Cuba to strengthen its food sovereignty, limiting imports of foreign foods to those not produced on the island: oil and others.

That spreading isn't always about saving

Cubans have learned to grow high productivity without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, but to do so it has been crucial, in addition to the harsh need, that the government put thousands of technicians in collaboration with peasants in the scientific development of agroecology. Anyone who today in the world cares about the transition from peak oil to post-oil, knows that in practice you will see in Cuba an agroecology that in times of collapse must meet the food needs of the population.

But just as the Cuban authorities have promoted agroecology with one hand, with the other they have continued to strengthen the cultivation of many fertilizers and complex technologies. In recent years, sometimes in collaboration with companies from Venezuela and Brazil, monoculture fields dedicated to soya, maize, potato, etc. have multiplied.

Cubans have also invested a lot in biotechnology, creating their own GMOs. The Cuban leaders say that biotechnology is not controlled here by large companies or by the dominant intellectual property in other countries, and that they work in Cuba with much stricter biosecurity standards to preserve the environment. In 2009, Cuban transgenic maize FR-Bt1 was planted in 6,000 hectares.

Since the spread of GMOs involves the proliferation of sophisticated pesticides, the government also promotes increased production of chemicals. This same year, the public company Juan Luis Rodríguez Gómez, dedicated to chemistry in the locality of Artemisa, along with Havana, has begun the production of Cuban glysofate, assuming the substitution of what was previously imported, the famous Roundup de Monsanto, the glysofate.

Lately, there has been much discussion in Cuba about agricultural and GM models in the middle. Whoever wants more Jankin – knows Spanish – will do well by listening to “Agroecology and transgenesis: Discussion in the electronic medium Cubadebate, on the one hand, Luis Montero Cabrera, president of the Chemical Association of Cuba, and on the other, Geraldo Martín, president of the agroecological experimental center Indio Matuey de Matanzas.

However, the future of Cuban farms will be played more in order to isolate the island than in the internal theoretical and practical debates. In March, Ivet Gozález put the following representative title to a chronicle of the IPS agency: “Thaw with the United States tests Cuban agroecology.” On the eve of Barack Obama’s visit to Havana, one of the main drivers of agroecology, Humberto Ríos, winner of the Nobel Alternative Goldman, showed his concern to the journalist about the consequences of opening up abroad in Cuba: “If no action is taken and delayed problems are solved, conventional agriculture and its products can swallow the 25 years of agroecology.”

The farmer Elsa Davalos, Pinar del Río, has been concerned because for so many years she has noticed how easy it is to switch to chemicals that offer short-term benefits after promoting fertilizers and natural remedies: "With the U.S. negotiations, chemicals that are saturated with agriculture around the world will extend to us. It’s going to be very difficult for us to keep the work done over these years.”