February 17, 2009

What can we learn from Cuba's economy?

Daniels

I accompanied more than 20 other architects, engineers and developers from Seattle and Portland to Cuba to see what lessons might be adaptable to our communities.

I was struck by the massive contradiction posed by a country whose people continue to overwhelmingly support a specific political agenda and leader while living within a failed economy for most of the last 50 years. But since I am not a political or social scientist, I'll leave that contradiction to others and focus on lessons to be learned from the decisions made by the Cuban people after the collapse of the Soviet Union — the “Special Period,” during which the country's gross national product was reduced to 34 percent of its former self within a few weeks.

Given our country's current economic challenges, are there sustainability lessons to be learned that we could apply here?

Organic agriculture

What is sustainability?

Words like affordable, sustainable and livable are thrown around regularly in conversations about how Seattle should grow. But we want to know what these words actually mean, and how the city can achieve them. Today, developer Kevin Daniels discusses sustainability lessons from Cuba. An upcoming editorial page will offer 50-word definitions of sustainability provided by members of the community, including elected officials, organizers and A/E/C industry players. Bloggers at the DJC blog SeattleScape will also weigh in. We hope you will join in the discussion. Here's how you can participate: • Email our AE editor, Shawna Gamache, at shawnag@djc.com with your thoughts or 50-word submittals for the page. • Join the discussion at SeattleScape at www.djc.com/blogs/SeattleScape/.

Numerous interesting sustainable approaches were adopted. One of the most interesting is how the country adapted to its loss of ability to trade major commodities (sugar, hardwoods, construction materials, etc.) for food products. Following a Soviet agricultural model, Cuba had ruined its farmlands with pesticides, applying more than 10 times the amount on average that our farmers do in the U.S.

At the beginning of the Special Period, soils were infertile and incapable of feeding the population, and trading options were limited by the U.S. embargo. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds in the first year alone. To combat the soil infertility, organic farming methods were adopted that are slowly repairing the land and increasing its productivity.

Today, the crop yields within certain cooperatives exceed our national averages. It's a great model for further study.

Urban farming

In addition, the large farms were run by the government and were very inefficient (in addition to the pollution). So, in Havana, some tracts of land within the city limits were actually leased to farmers at no rent as an incentive to produce food. That policy had the benefit of creating numerous small entrepreneurs growing food within the city limits, reducing transport costs. Cuba also has numerous neighborhood farmers markets for distribution.

This policy has increased the standard of living for farmers, so many college-educated residents are now farming and the social status of the farmer has been raised to where it used to be in this country. Maybe we should challenge government to look at increasing urban open space for not only recreation, but also for future food production?

Transportation

At the start of the Special Period, Cuba faced limited access to fuel almost overnight, and the country was forced to re-think its transportation system, generating a number of creative and successful approaches. There is now a countrywide custom to “pick up your neighbor,” spreading the cost of transportation over an increased ridership. All you are required to do for a ride is walk to the curb.

We have all heard the stories about the vintage 1940s and 50s American autos roaming the street. That remains true, but how they are used is a better lesson. These cars are maintained in good condition because their gas-powered engines were replaced with diesel engines long ago. A technology invented in 1892 that is even more sustainable than the newest electric car!

The vintage car owners are self-employed, running up and down streets that radiate like the spokes of a bicycle outward from the city center. A shared trip costs a single peso (about 3 cents). In addition, there is a law that says any government vehicle driving down the street must pick up any rider for free, making all government trips more fuel efficient.

Health care

Another sustainable practice to consider is Cuba's health care system. Even without access to the technology and pharmaceutical products available in our country, their primary and secondary care results are significantly better than ours. Why is that? Their focus is on preventive care and immediate access to health care for anyone who needs it.

From a sustainability standpoint, they focus on how to use fewer resources for more benefits. No one suggests trading our system for theirs, but we do need to make ours more sustainable in the long term, and a better market approach to preventive care is a start.

Neighborhoods

While the built environment is crumbling around them because they have no resources to repair it, Cubans have focused on improving neighborhoods with increased housing and a better sense of community. We need to realize that a sustainable lifestyle revolves around our immediate neighbors, and not a trip to the local mall.

The government has also focused on using current building stock to increase housing density rather than destroy the built environment to get increased density.

We need to take a broader look at our building codes and realize that being “sustainable” doesn't mean having the strictest energy codes in the country, but rather the smartest. If it takes 50 years of energy savings from a new building to equal the energy lost when the former building was demolished, why do we think tearing it down is a smart and sustainable approach?

The biggest contradiction of all may be why a country that has suffered greatly over the last five decades is leading the way with what the United Nations says is probably the most sustainable economy in the world. Is there a lesson in its experiences that can be adapted to our communities so we can truly be sustainable? What do you think?

Kevin Daniels is president of Nitze-Stagen & Co. and Daniels Development.

Yes, 50 years of autocratic socialism have led the way to the conditions of depleted soil, energy poverty and general economic austerity that lies in the future of all nations after the oil runs out. Cuba is indeed leading the way to the dystopian future!

I have written a book, Inside El Barrio: Everyday Life and Culture in Castro's Cuba, which can be order at amazon.com, that provides a framework to understand more deeply the viewpoints expressed in this commentary. The book, which is an outgrowth of a summer study abroad course that I developed and is based on extensive field over a five year period, provide an indepth look at how neighborhoods and communities operate. This explains why some of the elements of sustainability, such as urgan agriculture and the transport strategies work.

Here is a novel idea. Sustainability with abundance. This can be achieved with the government getting out of the way of the private citizen and not taxing or regulating his activities to the point he starves or turns on his taskmasters with a pitchfork and torch.
 
The concept that we are all to start collectively holding our breath so to speak, so the 'planet does not suffer' makes no practical sense whatsoever. Has not worked anywhere or at any time in human history. On the other hand, this concept has caused untold misery for human existence. Here is a news flash, the earth is not running out of resources. It is constantly recycling them into new resources as it has for eons. We just need to accept the fact that human involvement in our habitat is not parasitic and we are every much as capable of improvement of the earth as any other species.
 
Get over it.

I didn't realize that Cuba was sustainable, with all its oil subsidies from Venezuela! Quite the oxymoron.

Escrito por: yoanisanchez en Generation Y
 

 
The tedium of this end of year drove me to go see the dreary spectacle of our parliamentarians in their final meeting of 2008. The formula of posing problems without mentioning their true causes returned to the hall of the Palace of Conventions this December. The whole style of speaking starts with an initial reference more or less as follows: “Our Revolution has done much to improve retail trade, although problems remain…” Without this indispensable genuflection, one could fall into an unpermitted audaciousness, or seem to be hypercritical and ungrateful.
 

 
The final speech by Raúl Castro reaffirmed the idea of ending subsidies. Hearing that phrase, we tend to think only of the end of the quota of rationed food we Cubans receive. But the call to do away with symbolic prices and unnecessary “free” services is a double-edge sword which could end up hurting whomever wields it. If we were to be consistent in eliminating paternalism, we’d need to start by reducing the burden of maintaining this obese state infrastructure that we feed from our own pockets. Workers who produce steel, nickel, rum or tobacco, or who are employed in the bar of a hotel, receive a minuscule portion of the sale of their production or of the real cost of their services. The rest goes directly to subsidize an insatiable State.
 

 
Between the symbolic price of a pound of rationed rice, and the enormous “slice” of our salaries taken by those who govern us, we are more the givers than the receivers of subsidies. Eradicating them should be our slogan, not theirs
 

 
http://desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=383

If the government of the Castro brothers is so efficient in caring for its people,in all the aspects that you have mentioned in your article, why so many Cubans are willing to risk their lives departing from the country in rafts made of inner tubes?
 
I guess that they do not appreciate the greatness and outstanding potential for personal and collective growth of the system under which they are living more than 50 years.
 

 
And I almost forgot to mention the lack of necessity of general elections and of course, no need to have any constitutional freedoms as we know them in my adopted country, the great USA.

the u.s. by law is committed to strangling cuba economically in order to provoke a mass uprising. as to that goal it has failed for almost 50 years, but the policy has been a great success in causing economic dysfunction, apart from the cuban government's own policies, all supposedly for the good of the cubans. by the late 1990s cuba was practically alone in the americas, where neoliberalism was implemented everywhere. that worked out so badly that in reaction, and once the u.s.-supported dictatorships were done away with, people voted for change, and now it is the u.s. that is isolated because of the policy. the current dive of the u.s. economy into a historic disaster, leading the way into a dystopian future beyond anything cuba has seen, has confirmed for many that the change was a good idea.

Mr. Daniels is another one of those foreigners who goes to Cuba without knowing anything about the country and are immediately fooled by Castro's propaganda machine.
 
To say that Cuba's healthcare is better than ours, means that he was taken to the same hospitals where Michael Moore went with his 9/11 guests. The problem is that those hospitals are only for foreigners, who pay the Cuban regime with dollars or euros, but where regular Cubans are not allowed.
 
I am sure that Mr. Daniels didn't visit the Miguel Enriquez Hospital in Havana; or La Benefica or Quinta Covadonga also in Havana; or any of the hospitals in the rural areas that are all full of roaches and rats and where regular Cubans have to bring their own bed sheets, pillows and towels when they are admitted.

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party,and I grew up extremely poor.
 

 
Guillermo C. Infante.

I think the question was, is there anything we can learn from practices in cuba (such as crop rotations in order to replenish nutrients in the soils instead of fertilizer use)? Not, hey would you like to be apart of communist society? Don't get all anti-communism-propaganda on us, learning about farming practices from a quasi-communist country does not make us communists.
 

 
"Yes, 50 years of autocratic socialism have led the way to the conditions of depleted soil" -Steve Marquardt
 

 
Umm, actually, the U.S. is leading the path toward nutrient depleted soils. Go check out USDA reports on this. They've reported that our soils have drastically lost nutrients since the industrialization of our agriculture, especially over the last 50 years. Our fertilizers only focus on NPK, when there are so many nutrients in organic soils that we are missing.

"Decisions made by the Cuban people" and "people continue to overwhelmingly support a specific political agenda and leader". Cuba is a dictatorship where the government owns the media and 'independent' journalists are regularly imprisoned.
 

 
"Even without access to the technology and pharmaceutical products available in our country, their primary and secondary care results are significantly better than ours" Was this lifted right off of Castro's press release? How naive is Mr. Daniels?
 

 
I bet most of us know someone who has been saved by modern drugs and medical technology, something an average Cuban has no access to.
 

 
And, does Mr. Daniels really believe that Cuba's 'great model' is achieving higher crop yields than we are?
 

 
In short, NO, there is nothing we can learn from Cuba's economy. It is a failed state.

It's a dictatorship. How can you possibly use the words "people continue to overwhelmingly support"? Did you meet with people in private? People who don't work for the government? I have many times over the course of many years and I can tell you that this government and this system is not supported by the masses in Cuba. http://talkingcuba.wordpress.com/

Cuba is communist. What part of that do you not understand? The question should be what can CUBA lear from us...