Maggie's Farm

The portrait of university life offered by the online journal Quillette is not a flattering one. Free speech stifled at every turn. Scholars with divergent views relentlessly mobbed. Entire disciplines ruined by left-wing activism. A leafy dystopia populated by irrationally furious undergraduates, pathetically craven administrators, and professors who peddle mindless ideology at the expense of scientific inquiry. It’s enough to make anyone question the mental health of the academy, if not run screaming through the quad.

It used to be said, in jest and in truth, that it was better to kill your mother-in-law than a cow. The penalty re m.i.l. was 15 years in prison, for killing the cow, 25 years. Selling the meat was punished by 5 years, buying was 1 year. If your cow died, the very first thing you did was to call the vet to certify it died of natural causes, otherwise off to jail you went. Milk was for you and your family, not for sale. Unless you had a cow, possession of milk other than the milk ration for kids or provably store bought UHT was proof of black market activity. Rustling was a major problem, so if your cow disappeared, quickly off to the police to report it. Their first reaction was that this was a con, and you were the first suspect, so even if the remains were found 5 miles away, it was you who was to blame. I was in Cuba 1999-2005, and beef was only available ( legally ) in the government run ( redundant ) stores, and pretty low grade it was. With all this, any surprise that few people wanted to keep cows?

Taking a bus came with another advantage I hadn’t foreseen. I didn’t have to stop at the checkpoints.

I’m used to seeing military and police checkpoints when I travel abroad. Every country in the Middle East has them, including Israel if you count the one outside the airport. The authorities in that part of the world are looking for guns and bombs mostly. The Cuban authorities aren’t worried about weapons. No one but the regime has anything deadlier than a baseball bat.

Castro’s checkpoints are there to ensure nobody has too much or the wrong kind of food.

Police officers pull over cars and search the trunk for meat, lobsters, and shrimp. They also search passenger bags on city busses in Havana. Dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez wrote about it sarcastically in her book, Havana Real. “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.”

If they find a side of beef in the trunk, so I’m told, you’ll go to prison for five years if you tell the police where you got it and ten years if you don’t.

No one is allowed to have lobsters in Cuba. You can’t buy them in stores, and they sure as hell aren’t available on anyone’s ration card. They’re strictly reserved for tourist restaurants owned by the state. Kids will sometimes pull them out of the ocean and sell them on the black market, but I was warned in no uncertain terms not to buy one. I stayed in hotels and couldn’t cook my own food anyway. And what was I supposed to do, stash a live lobster in my backpack?

I did see animals once in a while, but nothing I couldn’t have handled in a rental car. Cows sometimes wander across the road on open ranch land in the American West where I live. No big deal. In the forested parts of the West, deer dart in front of cars every day. That can be fatal for deer and driver alike. Cows on the road in Cuba were no kind of problem.

I was actually glad to see cows on the road because the bus slowed enough that I could get a good look at them and even take pictures. Whatever the Cubans are doing with cattle, it’s wrong. The poor things are skeletons wrapped in leather. No wonder milk, meat, and cheese are so hard to come by.

I know next to nothing about cattle ranching, but the eastern (dry) side of my home state of Oregon has plenty of ranches, and I can tell you this much: Oregon cows have a lot more land to roam free on. They wander for miles eating scrub out in the semi-desert.

Agricultural fields in Cuba are microscopic, whether they’re for ranching for farming. They’re misshapen and haphazardly planted as if they’re amateur recreational farms rather than industrial-scale operations that are supposed to feed millions of people. My father grows pinot noir grapes in a vineyard no larger than these, but he really is doing it for recreational purposes in his retirement. He’s happy if he breaks even.

Cuba doesn’t even break even—hence the checkpoints to ensure no one is “hoarding.” The country could produce many times the amount of food it currently does. Deforestation wouldn’t be necessary. Most of the Cuban landscape I saw is already deforested. It’s just not being used. It’s tree-free and fallow ex-farmland. I’ve never seen anything like it, though parts of the Soviet Union may have looked similar.

Imbecilic communist agriculture practices aren’t the only problem. An invasive weed from Angola is choking half the farmland that would be in use, and no one seems to have a clue how to get rid of it.

Marabou weed, also known as the sicklebush, is a highly aggressive invasive tree species in Cuba. Originally from South Africa, it grows in all soils, altitudes and microclimates, and is located in almost all of the vegetation types on the island. It is a dense woody tree that can grow up to 8-10 meters tall and is covered in thorns.

It is estimated that Marabou weed covers 1.7 million hectares of once productive land. It invades abandoned agricultural land and can limit the productive capacity of farming areas currently in use. It competes for space in protected areas preventing the establishment of native vegetation. In forests, its presence hinders management and harvesting, significantly increasing costs.

However, because the wood is termite resistant, it is attractive for domestic use including tool handles, furniture, handicrafts, fence posts and fuelwood. Moreover, its ability to burn slowly made it an ideal source for high quality charcoal – its most widespread use. Despite its undeniable advantages, it a very difficult species to eliminate and is undesired by many farmers and land managers.

- Cuba moved nearly 15 percent less produce through domestic markets during the first six months of the year, compared with the same period in 2017, signaling another bad year for its agricultural sector, according to a government report.
The market sales in the report, issued over the weekend, account for 10 percent to 15 percent of agricultural output, according to a local expert, who requested anonymity due to restrictions on talking with journalists.

The remainder of food production is earmarked for processing plants, tourism, exports, a rationing system and meals at workplaces, hospitals, schools and other social uses, he said.

The country is dotted with outdoor markets and kiosks, more than 70 percent of which are state-run and have fixed prices for many items.

The state owns 80 percent of the land and leases most of that to farmers and cooperatives. The remainder is owned by family farmers.


The government often blames bad weather and the U.S. trade embargo for poor production, while critics charge it is due to a lack of private property and foreign investment, rickety infrastructure and a Soviet-style command economy.

Cuba’s government under former President Raul Castro began leasing land, decentralizing decision-making and introducing market mechanisms into the sector a decade ago. But the state has backtracked on the reforms, once more assigning resources, setting prices and controlling most distribution.

In 1993, the government started to change its ways and decentralize the management of the country’s farms. It created independent co-ops that farmed government land but were allowed to own their crop — even so, the crop was still sold to the state at a fixed price. There are now private farms that produce about 70 percent of all of the produce in Cuba. The private farms are required to sell 80 percent of their crop to the state, and can sell the remaining 20 percent in markets.

Raúl has continued to push through new land reforms. Over 3.5 million acres (1.5 million ha) of state land is leased for free in usufruct to motivate Cuban farmers to take up the plow. These farmers are encouraged to invest time and effort in keeping the land healthy, and are allowed to pass it along to their children.

These days, private farmers can raise cattle, but they aren’t allowed to kill the animals for their own consumption or to even sell the meat. If a cow dies, the farmer is fined. Except at upscale of restaurants, one rarely finds beef on the menu in Cuba. Most Cubans have never even tasted beef, as it’s priced out of their budget.