by Carey Clouse
The Architectural Review

When Cuba found itself abruptly cut off from trade with the Soviet bloc in 1989, the country entered into an economic crisis of unprecedented severity. Already sidelined from international trade due to US embargoes, Cuba became, almost overnight, a country detached from the rest of the world. In the years that followed, the tiny island nation struggled to export sugar and citrus fruits for more critical imports: the cereals, corn and meat that had become the staples of the Cuban diet. This was the beginning of Cuba’s food crisis, a period in which residents lost, on average, access to one third of their daily calories, the government instituted a peacetime austerity programme for food rationing, and most Cubans experienced widespread, inescapable hunger.

Along with the evaporation of food imports, Cuba lost access to the animal feed, fertilisers and fuel that had sustained the island’s agricultural efforts. Oil scarcity became so pervasive that it curbed pesticide and fertiliser production, limited the use of tractors and industrial farming equipment, and ultimately seized the transport and refrigeration network that was needed to deliver vegetables, meat and fruit to the tables throughout the region. Without the feed, fertilisers and fuel that had once sustained the nation, Cuba’s Green Revolution system of agriculture effectively unravelled.

Presented with a near collapse of its food provisioning system, the Cuban government responded with an overhaul of agriculture on the island, prioritising organic farming methods, the production of useful edible crops and the use of peasant labour. In urban areas, guerrilla gardening initiatives blossomed into new state-supported urban farming programmes, with widespread voluntary participation. These farming efforts have produced ‘what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture’, and in the process, resurrected the country’s local, affordable and accessible foodshed.

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