Castro regime’s crimes against humanity: Food scarcity

There is a long list of crimes against humanity committed on the Cuban people by the vicious and murderous Castro dictatorship. Not only do they murder, imprison, torture, and enslave, they starve the people as well. (You can read more about the Castro regime’s crimes HERE.)

Roberto Alvarez Quiñones in Diario de Cuba:

Food scarcity, another Castroist crime

If you were told that in a Latin American country almost 60% of the fertile land available for agriculture is not even cultivated, producing nothing at all, you would think they were pulling your leg, because in the 21st century this is impossible.

But, alas, it is. The country in question is Cuba, a beautiful tropical island covered with lush, fertile lands that astonished Columbus when he first saw them 525 years ago.

How is this possible in a country that the FAO, in the 1950s, cited as one of the greatest producers and exporters of food in Latin America in proportion to its total population?

One of Fidel Castro’s proselytizing pledges during his anti-Batista movement, after causing the death of dozens of young people in the disastrous assault on the Moncada barracks, was the promise that when he came to power he would implement profound agrarian reform, handing over lands to the peasants who worked them, and eliminating Cuba’s sprawling, unproductive plantations.

General Batista fled the Island, Castro rose to power, and proceeded to renege on those promises, seizing 77% of the nation’s agricultural land for the State. In this way he created his very own unproductive latifundia, the largest in the country since Spanish colonization.

As a result, in the first two years of the statist “Agrarian Reform” the production of sugar plummeted from 6.8 million metric tons to 3.8 million in the 1962-1963 harvest. The island ceased to be the leading producer and exporter of sugar cane in the world, a title it had boasted since the end of the 18th century. In 2017 Cuba produced 1.7 million tons of sugar – three times less than the 5.1 million tons produced 92 years ago.

Cuba devolved into one of the weakest of Latin American food producers, with some of the lowest agricultural yields in the Americas, including in sugar cane, in which it once was the world leader. If there were no fatal famines it was because Moscow began to subsidize the dictatorship to turn the island into a giant Soviet aircraft carrier, poised right next to the United States, and to expand Communist ideology throughout the Americas.

Even with the subsidies from the USSR, in March of 1962 the commander had to implement a food ration card, which is now 55 years old, the longest-lasting in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

With the “Agrarian Reform” the production of foodstuffs basic to the Cuban diet tanked: meat, rice, milk, vegetables, fruits and vegetables. From nearly seven million heads of cattle in 1958 for six million inhabitants (one cow per inhabitant), today the figure is 3.6 million undernourished cattle, for 11.3 million inhabitants (three inhabitants per cow). This is why in 2016 it produced three times less meat and less milk than in 1958, with twice as many inhabitants.

In the 1950s Cuba was self-sufficient in beef, milk, tropical fruits, coffee and tobacco. And it was almost self-sufficient in fish and seafood, pork, chicken, meats, vegetables, and eggs. It was the Latin American country with the highest fish consumption, and third in calories, with 2,682 daily. And it ranked seventh in the world in average agricultural wages, at 3 pesos a day (equivalent to dollars), according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Before 1959 Cuba imported 29% of the food it consumed. The Communists of the time (the PSP) complained that figure was too high for such a fertile country. Today, with the Communists in power, 80% of food is imported.

Continue reading HERE.