arthropodic

the pre-cult-of-personality history of what is now the Revolutionary Communist Party—the party led by noted crank Bob Avakian—is a surprisingly fascinating one, with many twists and turns as it attempted to find its place in the broader left and solidify its position as the primary representative of Mao Zedong Thought in America. although a never particularly large group (best guesses are that it peaked between 900 and 1,100 members in November of 1977) it was likely the most significant Maoist group in American history and certainly among the most influential of the New Left groups in the 1970s. the FBI, at the very least, thought of it as a significant threat to domestic security; thanks to the tireless work of Aaron J. Leonard and Conor Gallagher in Heavy Radicals, we know that FBI informants had infiltrated the group almost from its origin in the Bay Area in 1968.

but the part of this group's history i want to talk about today is from their early period—approximately 1970, before the FBI had near-singularly honed in on them—because it is an interesting reflection how weird and dramatic the New Left could sometimes be, and the severe optimism (or perhaps, millenarian fatalism) certain leftists had at the time for how a revolution could be won.

first, some background: going into 1970, the Revolutionary Communist Party (still under the name Revolutionary Union at the time, which will be used henceforth) had anywhere from 400 to 600 members and was by all accounts growing rapidly. it had been extremely visible at the Richmond strike of 1969 (done by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union against Standard Oil of California, now Chevron), and had been particularly successful in recruiting membership from the Peace and Freedom movement. within the Peace and Freedom Party of California—the California appendage of the national party—Revolutionary Union came into control of at least two Bay Area locals. beyond its usual East Bay stomping grounds, it also had particular strength on the campus of Stanford University, where it was an integral member of the anti-war coalition and eventually took in most of the campus SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter. indicative of its broader growth was the fact that it also successfully absorbed another Stanford radical group, the Peninsula Red Guard, who had a substantially more militant outlook than SDS.

this growth served to conceal significant differences of ideological opinion which, in short order, would become the organization's first serious split and briefly but dramatically reverse its explosion of membership. this split was the "Franklin schism," a schism that—to modern leftists—will undoubtedly sound very fucking stupid as recounted here.

the basic ideological divide of the Franklin schism

there were two sides to the "Franklin schism," the first of which was advanced by the eponymous Franklin group (so named because it was stewarded by and centered on Bruce Franklin, who had also been an ideological figurehead for the Peninsula Red Guard), and the second of which was advanced by most of the leadership of Revolutionary Union at the time.

what the Franklin group argued

The revolutionary struggle in the U.S. will certainly be waged primarily in the cities. Unlike other peoples’ wars, which inspire and teach us, ours will be fought in the urban areas. [...]
An important counter-insurgency theorist for the enemy, Colonel Rex Applegate, argues that urban jungles are far more difficult terrain for their forces than any tropical rainforest or mountainous region. Jungles or even mountains are essentially two dimensional, and are subject to saturation bombing with napalm, phosphorous, and explosives. But cities like New York or Chicago, with their high-rise apartments and multi-layered underground systems, are three-dimensional jungles. Furthermore, rural guerillas can never be completely integrated with large masses of people, because the rural population itself is spread out in small villages and farms. The urban guerilla, on the other hand, swims in a real ocean of the people.

and furthermore, argued that

Decaying imperialism is vulnerable to material attack not only as an economic system but also as a physical entity. Its utility systems are delicate, overstretched, indefensible, and absolutely vital. [...] Although it would be adventurism to think that the empire could be quickly destroyed through an attack on its complex system of power, transportation, and communication, we should recognize that large areas can be instantly paralyzed by such simple acts as the blocking of freeways and bridges, the destruction of power stations, and the disruption of communications.¹

what were the occurrences that, in their view, hastened the need for taking up "protracted urban war"? this is unfortunately difficult to say because the argument is rather underdeveloped here, even within the fast-and-loose context of the Franklin document as a whole. the Franklin group was mostly content to say that "the ruling class faces utter chaos at home[...] Lashing out in its final throes, imperialism turns to genocide abroad and fascism at home." perhaps the most concrete thing proposed, analysis-wise, was that

Armed revolutionary acts, including the ambushing of dozens of pigs, all across the country seem to indicate that the Black nation is in a transition from the mass spontaneous uprisings of 1964-1968 to the first stages of organized guerilla warfare.

now, in one sense, it is true that the domestic situation between 1964 and 1970 was exceptionally chaotic and violent that was more amenable to open guerilla warfare than anything before or since. Elizabeth Hinton in America on Fire states that "between May 1968 and December 1972, some 960 segregated Black communities across the United States witnessed 1,949 separate uprisings—the vast majority in mid-sized and smaller cities that journalists at the time and scholars since have tended to overlook." anti-war activism had likewise risen from merely a handful of disorganized dissenters to, around the same time the document was written, a mass movement carrying out a then-unprecedented student strike against the Kent State murders. politically-motivated bombings and terrorism, finally, had became dramatically more common: in the span of a year and a half between the start of 1969 and mid-1970, an estimated 4,300 bombings were carried out in the United States, including almost 400 in New York City alone.² the sheer anger of the period—with segregation, with discrimination, with poverty, with the endless, bloody wars in Indochina, with the United States as an entity—was undoubtedly boiling over every day in a way that for some living through it presented a Russian Revolution-like opportunity.

but simultaneously, this anger was neither a base from which you could wage armed revolution nor was it even particularly popular. sympathy for anti-war politics, much less student unrest or explicitly revolutionary politics, was severely lacking among the general public. as recounted extensively in David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot:

After 1968, most Americans deemed Vietnam a mistake. By 1971, six in ten lamented the war. That same year, roughly two-thirds of the public condemned antiwar protests. [...] Ultimately, most doves didn’t even like the antiwar activists. Back in September 1968, after the [1968 Democratic Party] Chicago convention, two-thirds of those who wanted to deescalate the Vietnam War backed Mayor Daley’s use of police “to put down the demonstrators.” Seven in ten whites, and the plurality of blacks, saw “radical troublemakers” as the cause of student unrest, rather than “deeply felt” beliefs in the “injustices in society.” Even among whites who thought the Vietnam War was a “mistake,” two-thirds thought “most student unrest” was caused by “radical troublemakers” rather than a belief in societal “injustices.”

that armed revolution would have not worked in such an ideological environment goes without saying. of course, the situation was actually worse still: by 1970, law and order politics were on their way toward almost total cultural hegemony, spearheaded largely by the white working-class but gaining credibility with even portions of the burgeoning Black political class that segregation had once disenfranchised. the "Black silent majority" of working- and middle-class Blacks, as Michael Javen Fortner describes it, felt increasingly little sympathy or solidarity with residents of the urban ghettos from which urban rebellions sprung. "After tilting the discursive terrain in the direction of racial equality during the struggles of the civil rights movement," Fortner writes, "working- and middle-class African Americans tilted it in favor of punitive crime policies and against economic justice for the urban black poor." if there were ever a base from which revolution could be waged, it was fleeting at best within the Black population and probably gone by 1970.

two other things bear final mention here. firstly: Revolutionary Union—like most leftist organizations of the time—was overwhelmingly white but, even more than just being overwhelmingly white, explicitly discouraged Black membership (instead usually referring them to the Black Panthers in this period). thus, even beyond the ill-developed premises of the "protracted urban war" thesis—and without downplaying the extent they were persecuted themselves—the membership of Revolutionary Union was not generally of a character that would be immediately harmed if such an analysis actually bore fruit. secondly: the case is strong that the Franklin group was doing little more than tailing the Eldridge Cleaver wing of the Black Panthers and their agitation for armed revolution. according to Steve Hamilton, a longtime Revolutionary Union member who Leonard and Gallagher interviewed, the Franklin group was convinced that the Panthers would be the "vanguard of the American revolution" and were exceedingly hesitant to be critical of them or their analysis.

what the rest of Revolutionary Union argued

needless to say, the non-Franklin group membership of Revolutionary Union was unimpressed with the thesis of "protracted urban war," a thesis they felt was wrong in principle and harmful in practice. although it could not bring forth the contemporary evidence i can that armed insurrection would make a very stupid tactical decision, it was still very obvious at the time that armed insurrection would be a very stupid tactical decision.

no doubt underscoring how deep the antipathy for the Franklin document ran (not least because it was a federal agent's dream, and indeed the FBI attempted to use it to justify extensive surveillance of Revolutionary Union), the official response felt a need to place in all-caps the following (which i will reproduce):

ANY ATTEMPT TO IMPLEMENT [the Franklin group document] WOULD NOT ONLY LEAD US AWAY FROM OUR MOST PRESSING TASK AT THIS TIME – BUILDING A REAL BASE IN THE WORKING CLASS, PROMOTING AND DEVELOPING ITS REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP OF THE UNITED FRONT AGAINST IMPERIALISM – BUT WOULD ACTUALLY LEAD TO THE EARLY DESTRUCTION OF OUR ORGANIZATION. [sic]

criticism only became more withering from this initial statement. the response to the Franklin document essentially dismisses it in its entirely, from its assessment of class consciousness ("Yes, the U.S. workers today don’t like the rich bastards who run the country," the response observes at one point, "But they have very little consciousness of themselves as a class, the class that will remake the world in its image.) to whether the US is fascist ("It is clear from the fact that we can still use elections and Congress (or State legislatures) as a platform, that we can still legally organize trade unions, rank-and-file caucuses, anti-war demonstrations, etc, that we are not yet in a period of fascism."), and of course to its thesis that a "protracted urban war" is possible. special derision seems to be given here, worth quoting in full:

Once large numbers of police, national guard, or army divisions are called in, practice has shown that they do the annihilating-or at least the routing. Even if urban uprisings occurred simultaneously in several key urban centers, historical experience (for example, the Russian revolution) indicates that they can only succeed if at least a major section of the enemy army comes over to the side of the people. In any case, this would be an insurrection, not a guerilla war of annihilation, or attrition. If, under U.S. conditions, an urban war of attrition is not going to be fought by the method of annihilation, how is it going to be fought? [...] even if [the Franklin paper's revolutionary strategy] came to pass, how would it lead to the seizure of state power? Don’t excite us with the details of this glorious war and then neglect to tell us how we won! If this question sounds sarcastic – it is only because the scheme elaborated above is just that – a scheme, a concoction. It is not based on a scientific summing up of mass struggle in the U.S., but only the romantic dreams of the writers of this paper.

(the notion that "organized guerilla warfare" was being undertaken by Black people is also put through the woodchipper here, with the response paper effectively calling the description of spontaneous uprisings fetishistic and concluding that while "more and more pigs are getting killed by people in the Black community who just won’t put up with any more brutality and murder", such acts were "overwhelmingly the spontaneous acts of unorganized individuals.")

the Franklin document, the response concludes, "shows no understanding of the qualitative changes that will take place in the revolutionary movement as the crisis of U.S. Imperialism deepens and becomes more acute; as more and more workers are organized into struggle against U.S. Imperialism; as a new, genuine Communist party of the proletariat assumes its rightful place as the leader of the revolution." but, not content to merely call the document a bunch of bullshit, the response further derides the position of the Franklin group as adhering to the Weatherman line—that is, a tendency of politics whose theory of change was entirely centered on the "unemployed and petty-bourgeois youth" (specifically white youth) and on the methods of "terrorism and adventurism."

the Franklin schism happens

the back-and-forth between the Franklin document and the response was indicative of a broader period in which all hell seems to have broken loose within Revolutionary Union. unfortunately, reconstructing the chronology of this matter is quite difficult and not within my immediate capabilities. what are unambiguous though are the sides (Franklin on the one; and Avakian and most of Revolutionary Union leadership on the other) and the growing tensions within the organization even before the exchange.

conflict over the Franklin document seems to have begun by October 1970, when it was presented at a Central Committee meeting, as recounted in an FBI memo that Leonard and Gallagher quote in Heavy Radicals:

At the Revolutionary Union (RU) Central Committee meeting 10/10-11/70 H. Bruce Franklin presented to the approximately 75 participating delegates a paper entitled “Protracted Urban War.” This document urges immediate strategic application of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist concept of protracted guerrilla warfare in the cities. Franklin urged the building of a well-trained RU guerrilla organization which would start actual attacks on the establishment with the objective of awakening the masses and overcoming any hesitancy of the membership to engage in armed revolutionary struggle. According to informants present at the meeting, Franklin’s vanguard revolutionary thesis highlights a split within the RU with the majority supporting immediate guerrilla warfare.

following this meeting, polemics continued to be exchanged despite attempts at mediation, probably influenced by the fact that—unusually for such a sectarian dispute—both groups were quite large within the organization. Franklin's side was accused of supposed "Weathermanism" and of having conflicts of personality with Avakian that were being laundered as ideological. Avakian's side was accused of denying the necessity of armed struggle and of rejecting the national liberatory potential of Black and Chicano people, which it supposedly downplayed in favor of the industrial proletariat. inevitably, though, one side had to win out—and owing to the fact that it was mostly comprised of people in power, the winner was Avakian's side. at an indeterminate point (but likely at the end of 1970) Revolutionary Union took the "unusual" step of publicly expelling Bruce Franklin, his wife, Jane Franklin, and two additional members of the Franklin group Janet Weiss and Jeff Freed.

this action precipitated the actual split, which ultimately proved very large for a split with an obviously correct side (Avakian's) within an organization that also likely had no more than 600 members at the time. even the Revolutionary Union conservatively estimates that it lost approximately one-third of its membership (perhaps 150 people) to the Franklin group; the informants within it suspected closer to 200, which could have been up to half of the organization's strength. the exit was also not a clean one, with the Franklin group offering a withering, final volley in public that

RU leadership in some areas has consolidated a revisionist line in the organization. They do not support the Black Panther Party. They base themselves not on the needs of the most oppressed, but on the fully employed factory workers. They believe the U.S. is a “bourgeois democracy,” not a developing fascist state. They deny the national liberation struggles of Black and Chicano people, and back off from supporting them concretely. They believe white revolutionaries can wait for armed struggle. They put down the women’s movement, and don’t develop women’s leadership. They don’t see Marxism-Leninism as a living tool to serve the people, but as an abstract dogma.

the Venceremos side-show

ultimately most of these splitters ended up following Franklin into a smaller Chicano-led group called Venceremos, which had existed for several years previously and suddenly became quite a different (albeit still Chicano-oriented) organization. through Venceremos, Franklin and his allies finally had a channel through which to enact their theory of change—something they set about doing rather quickly with a variety of tactics. according to Leonard and Gallagher the newly-revitalized Venceremos

continued to publish the Free You newspaper, making it bi-lingual. They also published the San Jose newspaper, the Maverick. It operated Venceremos College and the People’s Medical Center, which were free alternatives to standing institutions. Along with this they “assumed recognized leadership” of a number of workers’ caucuses, community organizations, and the local Young Partisans, which they described as having “chapters on all the local community college campuses and in many high schools and junior highs.”

Venceremos was also heavily armed, presumably owing to Franklin's continued belief in the necessity of armed revolution. it apparently maintained "secret stashes of rifles, grenades, pipe bombs, and other explosives and they urged members to stay armed at all times --- advice that was apparently followed." this contrasted somewhat interestingly with the group's participation in local electoral politics: it ran Jean Hobson (in 1971) and Jeffrey Youdelman (in 1973) for Palo Alto City Council; Joan Dolly for Menlo Park City Council (in 1972); and Doug Garrett for Palo Alto School Board (in 1973). none were successful, although debatably it was an achievement to receive even the few hundred votes these candidates could while being openly associated with a group whose theory of change included violent revolution. when the group was not running in local elections, it also made a point of raising hell and brought "verbal aggressiveness never before seen in the city’s politics."

one consistent limiter to the efficacy of its tactics was that Venceremos, bluntly stated, tended to be an internal trainwreck of an organization. within months of the Franklin influx late in 1970, the group saw its own serious split in which it lost most of its Stanford-based membership to the “Intercommunal Survival Committee to Combat Fascism” (which Leonard and Gallagher call a Black Panther Party auxiliary). a more serious incident which ultimately blew up the organization was when several of its members ambushed and killed an unarmed prison guard to free prisoner (and fellow Venceremos member) Ronald Beaty in 1972. Beaty was later arrested with Jean Hobson, one of the ambushers and—in an effort to save his own skin—gave up the names of Hobson and three other accomplices. (Beaty and all four of the people he named were later sentenced to prison.) seeing a chance to destroy what it considered one of the most dangerous radical groups operating at the time, authorities then parlayed that into arrests of Franklin and most of Venceremos' leadership. only two of the eight charged apparently went on to be convicted, but the scrutiny was sufficient to force the group to disband in September 1973.

the Revolutionary Union glides on

on the Revolutionary Union side of things, the split was seriously damaging but ultimately not fatal; the group certainly was not led to the dead-end you might consider Venceremos to be. still, it seems likely that the organization did not recover in terms of membership for several years (the peak of 900 to 1,100 members having been attained in 1977, and Leonard and Gallagher estimating perhaps 2,000 or so people having churned through the organization over its life).

primarily, the split entrenched models of organization and attitudes that would initially benefit Revolutionary Union's growth, but later unravel it almost fatally in 1977/78—after which its relevance to the revolutionary movement also drastically waned and it primarily became Bob Avakian's political vehicle. as Leonard and Gallagher summarize at the end of Heavy Radicals chapter 4:

What was arrived at [after the Franklin schism] was a further closing the door on the 1960s mindset of questioning everything and challenging authority. In its place was the entrenchment of a quasi-religious apprehending of Marxism—though the RU was hardly the worst in this in the new communist movement—coupled with a hierarchal / authoritarian organizational model, albeit one that self-consciously rejected such a characterization. This did not happen immediately or at a single moment, but it was the path they went down.

The Franklin rift was also a touchstone of sorts on how to sum-up schismatic internal struggles. Here, they argued that it allowed “[r]apid progress theoretically, politically and organizationally.” While this was not without truth, it was also the case that quite a bit was lost it would seem, from their perspective—not the least of which were a good number of young revolutionaries taken down a path that would in one way or another lead to them no longer being part of a revolutionary movement, to say nothing of some garnering significant prison time. [...] There was also a problem with the RU’s misplaced minimizing of the damage done, and the ‘good riddance’ attitude they assumed as regards those in sharp disagreement. This would continue as a problem going forward.

what can be taken away from all of this? i'm not really sure—but i think it is indicative, if nothing else, of how the late 1960s and early 1970s were an optimistic but rudderless time for American socialism. which way would the movement go? nobody was certain, and in that uncertainty an abundance of views proliferated. many of those views were unchallenging and orthodox; many of them, including even the main Revolutionary Union line here, were not. and there was a lot of adventurism, some of which we still arguably live in the shadow of today.

notes

¹ it is interesting, as an aside, to interpret and compare this theory of change with modern far-right terrorism, which is almost universally accelerationist and so proposes and acts on similar impulses. perhaps the biggest difference is that that the Maoists of 1970s were not accelerationists, at least in the way the term is used with respect to far-right terrorists. we might term this a division of constructive versus destructive; that is, the Maoists of the Franklin group believed "accelerationist" tactics were only integral to the initial stage(s) of people's war—a seizure of state power by a dictatorship of the proletariat was still the ultimate goal, obliging its preservation. far-right terrorists, by contrast, usually believe existing state power must be destroyed (because it is hopelessly corrupted by any number of scapegoats) and a fascist system can only be rebuilt from the void of state power that results.

² these were usually minor bombings intended only to do property damage; some, however, were much more serious and far more potentially lethal. the bombing spree of the Melville collective (organized around future Attica prisoner and martyr Sam Melville) became particularly notorious and damaging in this timeframe. the Weathermen townhouse fiasco—in which three members of the Weather Underground blew themselves up and leveled their entire building in the process—also occurred in this period, and it had clearly been the intent of the would-be bombers to kill people.

i think almost everyone who follows me is aware of the illegal, horrific blockade on Cuba that has been imposed by the United States since approximately 1960; what you are probably less aware of though is how the blockade manifested in practice, the pressures it put Cuba under even before the fall of the Soviet Union, and what it was like at its worst during the 1990s. today's post will go into these details.

the situation before the embargo

Cuba has historically been extremely dependent on imports, some of which is a product of its geography and some of which is a product of ideology and capitalism. as summarized by Sinan Koont in Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba:

The tropical climate makes it difficult to cultivate temperate-zone crops, such as wheat and soybeans, which are common staples of human and animal diets. Grains for feeding cattle or baking white bread, which is now central to the Cuban diet, must all be imported. In addition, the historical legacy of colonial agriculture—which was based on the cultivation of one or two highly labor-intensive export crops, mainly sugar, using slaves imported from Africa (and later indentured workers from China)—led to the relative neglect of food crops. Not only was land used disproportionately for export crops, but this relative overemphasis extended to areas such as research and development, credit and services provision, and governmental fiscal support. All these factors made food security import-dependent and likely to evaporate, especially for slave or slave-descendant populations, during hard times for export industries.

as a consequence, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution "imports constituted a third of all food consumed in Cuba, and 70 percent of imported foodstuffs came from the United States," according to Adriana Premat. few attempts were made by the pre-Revolution government to mitigate this import dependence. it could nevertheless be said that Cuban food security was superficially decent as long as imports continued: Koont does note that Cubans in this period received approximately 2,500 calories per capita per day. belying these numbers, however, were the inequal distribution of wealth and land; the large-scale usage of seasonal employment (meaning rates of unemployment in the 30% range at any given time); widespread illiteracy and poverty; and a general lack of amenities, especially in non-urban areas. many of these inequalities were factors in the growth, and eventual success, of revolutionary sentiment.

the Cuban Revolution of course sought to rectify this squalid state of affairs, and in most areas its program was quite successful from the beginning. agrarian and urban land reforms had been largely carried out by 1963 (with compensation, although this did little to placate capitalist interests or quell American anti-Cuban sentiment), and health care and education became far more accessible to Cubans.¹ one area in which it was not successful however was diversifying Cuba's agricultural produce and minimizing its import dependence. efforts to move away from the island's sugarcane monoculture—which had characterized the pre-Revolution economy and was a major source of income—were hampered by poor planning, labor shortages, and reduction in export earnings that obliged the government to keep the monoculture in place.

the embargo during the Cold War

it is likely a renewed move away from sugarcane would have occurred if not for worsening relations with the United States; nevertheless, the failure to accomplish this ended up having significant downstream implications. prompted by Cuba's program of expropriation, and to a lesser extent by its declaration of socialist ideology in 1960, the United States gradually implemented sanctions—and then the full-on embargo that continues to this day—on Cuba. such punitive actions by the United States had severe effects, and foregrounded a number of uncomfortable points of weakness in the Cuban system that the revolutionary government could not trivially resolve.

the first of these was suddenly pushing the island's food supply into extreme precarity. with a substantial portion of the island's calories contingent upon importation, shortages became the norm by 1962. food rationing and the ration booklet (libreta)—for which Cuba is so infamous—was implemented as a consequence; this was, and to this day remains, the only way to ensure a baseline level of food security for all Cubans.

the second of these was how the embargo definitively pushed Cuba into the Soviet sphere of influence—and as a byproduct, locked Cuba into another relationship in which they became extremely import-dependent. while trade deals with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries allowed Cuba to attain high levels of food security (reaching 2,900 calories per capita per day by 1989), they also incentivized the continuation of the sugarcane monoculture and the adoption of a rigid, inflexible, export-oriented agricultural system. Cuba, writes Koont, "essentially became the provider of sugar and citrus fruits to COMECON [the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance]." in exchange, observe Rosset and Benjamin (1994), Cuba received

petroleum, industrial equipment and supplies, agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides, and foodstuffs — possibly as much as 57 percent of the total calories consumed by the population. [But t]he favorable terms of trade which Cuba obtained for sugar and its other exports made it cheaper for Cuba to export sugar and import foodstuffs than to produce sufficient food domestically.

thus it is only somewhat exaggeratory to say that the Cuban agricultural system during the Cold War came to imitate much of what had been overthrown in the first place—with the embargo in place, agricutural exports became one of the primary ways Cuba could pay for its much-needed imports. the consequences of such an agricultural system and its importance to ensuring Cuba could import goods were, of course, significant. arguably this relationship led to the disastrous 1970 sugar campaign, where much of the non-agricultural economy withered as the country's laborers attempted—and failed—to meet a sugar harvest quota of 10 million tons. another consequence was severe ecological harm, not dissimilar to what is seen on import-dependent capitalist island nations. "Nearly 80% of agricultural lands in Cuba, says Koont, "had been incorporated into the state sector and organized into gigantic farms under centralized government control" by 1975. the export-focus of these farms obliged them to care exclusively about yield, meaning Cuba

was using more fertilizers per hectare than the United States or any Latin American country: 202 kg/ha compared with 93 kg/ha in the United States and 56 kg/ha in Latin America. Its use of 22 tractors per 1,000 ha exceeded the averages for the Caribbean region (17), Latin America (11), and the entire world (19).

productivity decreases, nutrient deficiencies, and issues of erosion were eventually noted in up to 75% of cultivated areas—clearly a result of this extreme reliance on fertilizers and petroleum products, but which only additional fertilizer inputs were in a position to make up for.

the third point of weakness was Cuba's now-unique vulnerability to even minor shocks or disruptions of its imports and exports (which it should be noted did not ever fully cover the economic damage imposed by the embargo). this vulnerability did not go unnoticed or unexploited by the United States, which spent most of the Cold War attempting to reinstate capitalism in Cuba by any means necessary. the constant assassination attempts on Fidel Castro are only the most obvious manifestation of attempts to disrupt Cuba, of which there were many others such as Operation Mongoose and the proposed Operation Northwoods. not to be outdone by the government, though, there were also grassroots pressures against Cuba: from the 1960s to the 1980s Cuban exiles were among the most prolific terrorists in the United States, committing dozens of bombings against Cuba and agitating for regime change by the United States.

Cuba was also misfortunate or, in some cases, hubristic in a way that backfired. the country experienced a wide variety of setbacks throughout the Cold War and particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. these included two major outbreaks of African swine fever virus in 1971 and 1980 that necessitated the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs; the introduction of blue mold disease which affected a quarter of Cuba's tobacco crop in 1979 and almost all of it in 1980, apparently necessitating the halting of the tobacco industry for almost two years; the introduction of sugarcane rust disease in 1979, to which Cuba's most common variety of sugarcane was especially vulnerable and which necessitated large-scale replanting; dengue fever epidemics in 1977 and 1981 that infected 4 million and 350,000 people respectively; and a major outbreak of acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis in 1981.

for rather understandable reasons, i should note that Cuba has called many of these events biological warfare or terrorism from United States. owing to the clandestine nature almost all such acts would involve—and the general context of United States desperation to restore capitalist rule—it is hard to rule this out completely. but the prevailing evidence is too weak on all counts for me to endorse any claim like this. Raymond A. Zilinskas is rather thorough in assessing, and dismissing, such claims in his paper "Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare by the United States: Assessing the Evidence." medical researchers such as Trotta et al. also categorically dismiss any link between the CIA, Cuban rebels, and the introduction of African swine fever virus.

an allegation in this space that is not worth dismissing out of hand, though, comes from Warren Hinckle and William Turner's The Fish is Red, in which a whistleblower the pair interviewed alleges that in 1969 and 1970,

Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the California desert [...] overflew the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains over nonagricultural areas and left the cane fields arid (the downpours caused killer flash floods in some areas).

this may sound like the most outlandish of the claims—and there is no reason to believe cloud seeding itself was responsible for either the aridity or the downpours—but it is actually the most plausible claim based on available evidence. this allegation coincides with Operation Popeye, a military cloud-seeding project (based on research carried out at China Lake Naval Weapons Center) that the Air Force carried out over Vietnam in an attempt to extend the monsoon season. for approximately five years, the United States actually was, on most days, dumping two sorties of lead iodide and silver iodide into the atmosphere over Vietnam. it does not seem super implausible a more limited campaign of experimentation was being done to Cuba in this period.

the embargo after the Cold War

all of these points of weakness became far more severe as the Eastern Bloc began to liberalize and disintegrate. Gorbachev's ascension in 1985—and his subsequent termination of special deals with Cuba—arguably mark the start of an inevitable trend toward catastrophe that accelerated as the 1980s progressed. between 1986 and 1990 Cuba experienced significant financial contraction, something it attempted to fight and protest to COMECON without much success. although often dated to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in many respects the Special Period had already begun by 1989—by then it was clear that COMECON was totally dysfunctional, and most of the Eastern Bloc had de facto begun to cut Cuba loose. when the Soviet Union began to be delinquent on contracted imports in 1990, conservation efforts were already in place. the formal dissolution of the COMECON in August 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 were largely formalities for Cuban purposes.

the formalistic nature of these events was small comfort to Cubans, however. the socialist bloc of countries had previously received more than 80% of Cuba's trade—with these gone, and the embargo still in place, what can only be described as apocalyptic reductions in the availability of everything followed. Cuba lost half of its food imports; 60% of its pesticide imports; 77% of its fertilizer imports; and half of its needed petroleum. exports and imports declined generally by around 80%. Cuban gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by anywhere from 35% to 50% between 1989 and 1993, and the Cuban economy of 1993 had shrunk to 65% of its 1989 size. Cuban money became largely worthless, both because real wages fell by more than 50% and because the state became unable to offer consumer goods on which to actually spend said money. factories became inoperable between energy cuts and loss of raw material inputs, while agriculture collapsed so severely that it necessitated a break-up of state farms. car travel became prohibitive between shortages of gasoline and lack of car replacement parts and dropped by one-third from its already low level; public transportation, likewise, ground largely to a halt, rendering bicycles the only realistic way to travel for many. the state-subsidized ration stores, which Premat says "previously adequately covered basic food needs," were rendered unable to do so and soon provided only around half of established nutritional requirements—a dramatic loss of calories per capita followed. according to Koont, by 1994:

the daily per capita nutritional intake of the Cuban population had reached its nadir at levels well below the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] recommendations for a healthy diet (given in parentheses): 1,853 calories per day (2,400 calories recommended), 46 grams of protein (72 grams recommended), and 26 grams of fat (75 grams recommended).

the situation, in short, amounted to one of the most substantial reversals of peacetime quality of life ever observed.

that this situation did not quickly topple the government outright is a testimony to the deep support for socialism in Cuba; nevertheless, the United States saw blood in the water and attempted to deliver a crippling final blow through tightening the already punitive embargo. in 1992 the Torricelli Act banned exports of food and medicine to Cuba (excepting only humanitarian aid), and in 1996 the Helms-Burton Act made foreign corporations doing business in Cuba subjects of U.S. sanctions. under the latter bill in particular, according to Premat, U.S. companies were endowed with the power to "sue foreign companies that conduct business with Cuba involving property previously “confiscated” by the Cuban government from U.S. citizens." (unsurprisingly, this law violates international trade law.) both of these laws undoubtedly served to make the crisis worse and longer lasting.

things bottomed out roughly in 1994, by which point the Cuban government was obliged (after much citizen participation and debate through the workers’ parliaments) to enact a degree of liberalization. so summarizes Helen Yaffe in We Are Cuba!, the state legalized the US dollar, committed to a fiscal adjustment, committed to joint ventures with foreign capital, opened up further to tourism, began large-scale conversion of state farms into cooperatives, opened private farmers’ markets, and increased avenues for self-employment. these reforms (which were generally intended to be temporary and last only as long as the crisis did) were instrumental in halting—and reversing—the crisis. growth ultimately returned in the second half of the 1990s and, slowly but surely, things began stabilize back toward normality. although a number of them have continued in some form or another, many of these reforms were reversed or repealed by the mid-2000s as their necessity receded.

the effects of the economic crisis still echo through Cuba, unfortunately. in many respects it marks a permanent delineation of before and after—Cuba before the crisis was simply in a much better position than it is today, and even 35 years later this shows no signs of changing. as Yaffe says solemnly:

living standards had not recovered their 1990 level by the end of the decade, productive capacity, infrastructure and public services had been crippled, and the dual economy and price distortions had skewed incentives and entrenched inequalities. The economic contraction generated a social crisis. Cuts in food consumption, utility supplies, basic goods and transport led to malnutrition, emigration, inequality and illegality.

notes

¹ the change was quite remarkable. Agustin Lage Davila says that on the education front, the mass literacy campaigns of 1961 involved "more than 270,000 voluntary teachers" and led to 700,000 people being taught to read and write. on the healthcare front according to Don Fitz, by 1963 the revolutionary government had built "122 rural centers and forty-two rural hospitals, with 1,155 beds, 322 doctors, and 49 dentists." Koont says there had previously been just three general hospitals for all of rural Cuba.

long-time followers will know that i've read about Cuba quite a bit, and particularly their system of agriculture (on which i have a few thousand words of notes). after some time away from this subject, i'm back to reading two of the books on my lengthy to-read list: Sowing Change: The Making of Havana's Urban Agriculture by Adriana Premat and Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba by Sinan Koont. these have been pretty illuminating of some of the nuances i was not previously aware of and, more significantly, the fascinating heterogeneity of opinion from actual farmers within the Cuban system. today's post will go over a lot of this.

what is urban farming like?

first, here's a recap of what urban farming is like in Cuba, starting with a summary table by Cruz Hernández and Sánchez Medina (2001).

at-scale production of food in urban areas generally comes from the state-owned, commercially-operated organoponicos—these being described by Sinan Koont as "collections of roughly 30 meters by 1 meter rectangular walled constructions (canteros) containing raised beds of a mixture of soil and organic material." there are also huertas intensivas [intensive gardens] which are in essence ground-level organoponicos—they produce a smaller yield as a result. given what they exist to do, the social objective of the organoponicos and huertas intensivas—to serve a local community and provide it with food—probably does not surprise you.

at the smaller scale, Cuban urban agriculture now makes heavy usage of parcelas, which are previously-unused plots of land that have been converted to agricultural use. individually, Cuban citizens are also encouraged to plant patios, essentially home gardens. initially disfavored because of their small-scale, both parcelas and patios took on much greater prominence following the economic crisis of the 1990s, during which they were symbolic of Cuba's struggle to adapt and survive. today—while the situation is less acute, and centralization of state provisions is once again possible—they have grown increasingly symbolic of Cuban sustainability, and are integral to a major trend of urban greening in Cuba. (Havana in particular has seen greenspace go from 12 square meters per inhabitant to at least 23 square meters.)

parcelas operate as usufruct entities—the individual does not own the land but may indefinitely benefit from its production, according to Koont, "an acceptable level of agricultural production is maintained" on the plot. as a consequence parcelas are forbidden from being used for profiteering, such as "hiring labor to work [...] for one’s own benefit as if one were a terrateniente (powerful landowner) in prerevolutionary times." patios, meanwhile, are privately-owned and citizens are granted the right to sell or barter any surplus food from them. in general, both parcelas and patios are afforded autonomy within the law; unless illegal activity is taking place, their stewards cannot be compelled to do anything. they are free to sow, or operate, the plots in their manner of choosing with their products of choice.

geographically, parcelas often complement or occupy a wide array of land usages, including "[previous] demolition sites, playing fields, and even portions of public parks." patios by contrast are frequently planted in home patios (hence the name), alleyways, or on rooftops

the social objective of parcelas and patios can vary, although a generalization can be made that they exist to fortify the Cuban Revolution by creating a venue of communal responsibility through which social solidarity can be expressed. Adriana Premat notes that parcelas and patios frequently reflect the most immediate desires of their urban communities; this, she says, is because "general disconnection from the broader society is thought to be equally harmful [as unrestrained pursuit of profit] and in need of correction."

what are things like for producers?

unsurprisingly, many producers consider their stewardship rewarding—and yet incredibly demanding and difficult.

the benefits, it should go without saying, are many; Fernandez et. al note that urban farms have "...increased availability and access for the Cuban population to a diverse selection of fresh fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants. This has served to increase the dietary diversity in the population and to improve nutrition in a diet that is otherwise heavily comprised of meat, rice, beans, and root crops." the urban farms also provide widespread employment—up to 350,000 in direct employment by some estimates—and have facilitated significant growth in labor participation by women. beautification and community building has also resulted: urban farms have a prosocial effect both on their stewards and the communities their urban farms are in, particularly as they replace previously vacant or underdeveloped plots of land. some health clinics in Havana reportedly even use urban farming and gardening as a tool for managing depression and other mental health issues among clients, particularly elderly Cubans in need of company and support.

any form of farming is rough, however, particularly for smallholders. according to Premat, urban producers often use "terms such as mucho sacrificio (much sacrifice) and un trabajo esclavo (an enslaving job)" to describe their labor; many producers also feel a degree of alienation from their neighbors and suspicion they are being conspired against. this is not an unfounded fear: the relation of urban farms to state institutions is a complicated one, and producers often feel that their farms, and especially their neighborhoods, are "a sort of “public stage” where they [can] not afford to be totally open and [have] to manage their image." the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), whose function is to report on potentially "counterrevolutionary" or "ideologically subversive" activity, are a primary contributor to this feeling. arbitrary intervention by the government—often necessitating the disposal of products and changes from what producers feel is best for their situation—is another.

there are also the practical realities of Cuba's situation: due to shortages in goods and materials—most of which can be attributed to the embargo—large-scale improvements to patios, parcelas, or organoponicos and huertas intensivas are expensive and must often be limited in scope. wages are frequently insufficient to acquire necessary machinery, specialized tooling, or in some cases even mundane objects like ladders.

still, many producers take pride in their work, their place in the community, and often times their perceived contribution to the defense of Cuba and the stability of its revolution. it would perhaps be most accurate to say that producers—in spite of their complex relationship with state institutions and frequent complaints and worries about the government—see their work as deepening Cuba's socialism and democracy, even when this work brings them into conflict with the state.

urban farming "privatization"

one interesting trend that Premat documented, and which i'll make the final subject in this post, was a process of "privatization" by producers in which they enclose the parcelas they steward. she profiles one such "privatization" in the book that took in the municipality of El Cerro—this should give you a practical idea of what one looks like:

Sitting in the crowded bedroom-studio of his tiny three-room house in El Cerro, about six blocks from Roberto’s house, Pedro, a man in his late fifties, succinctly recounted how he and his neighbors had created four gardens on a demolition site adjoining their residences on Dawn Street. He recalled, “We took out all the garbage and sealed the façade of the building so that no one could dump garbage into the site.” This “sealing off” made the gardens both inaccessible and invisible from the street. In addition to the obvious practical reasons for this enclosure (preventing vandalism and theft, damage by animals, etc.), this action effectively excluded surrounding community members from a space that had previously been open to everyone.

now, i put privatization in quotes here because, legally, no actual change in status is taking place—indeed the state could technically intervene at any time, either through interpreting such actions as contrary to community/state interests or just through invented pretense. this is Cuba—the state does often intervene arbitrarily in this way. often, however, they simply leave producers alone. thus, de facto, when many Cuban producers enclose their parcelas like this, it transforms the plot from a parcela (state-owned and usufruct) to a patio (privately owned). indeed Premat observes that many Cuban producers see parcelas that they steward as extensions of themselves, or their properties, and they use them for other purposes accordingly:

Parcelas are often used by the caretakers and their families to store private household goods or for activities like hanging the laundry to dry. They also contain furniture, such as tables and chairs, used for private social gatherings and for playing domino games with friends. It is also not uncommon for parcelas to be decorated with personal touches that reflect the individual tastes, history, and identity of the caretaker.

undoubtedly this has interesting social and theoretical implications—especially for property and ownership under a socialist model—but i'm not the right person to parse them out. for now, consider it an interesting vignette of the complexities of everyday life in a socialist-aspiring country.

please do not adjust your coyote