What the Oxen Were For
When Soviet trade collapsed in 1991 Cuba lost most of its fuel, nearly all of its fertiliser and about a third of its economy, and the food system that replaced it was written up abroad as the world's largest experiment in organic farming. It was not an experiment and nobody chose it.
Organopónico Vivero Alamar sits between a housing estate and a road on the eastern edge of Havana, and the first thing to understand about it is that nothing grows in the ground there. The site is compacted fill. So the beds are built rather than dug — long walled troughs of block and concrete, filled with a mixture of soil and compost, raised to about knee height. There are worm sheds producing the compost, a bench culturing fungi and bacteria for pest control, and something over a hundred people on the payroll. The lettuce is sold over a counter at the gate to the people in the flats across the road, which are about ninety seconds away.
This image travelled a long way. From the late 1990s Cuba was written up in Europe and North America as the one country that had converted a national agriculture to low-input organic methods, and in 1999 the Grupo de Agricultura Orgánica was given the Right Livelihood Award for demonstrating it. Delegations came. Books were written. What tends to get left out of them is why the beds were built, which was not that anyone in Havana had concluded that agrochemicals were bad for the soil. It was that in 1991 the ships stopped arriving.
What 1991 removed
The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, and with it the trading bloc that had bought Cuban sugar above world price and sold Cuba oil below it. Cuban foreign trade fell by roughly four fifths in about three years. Fertiliser imports dropped by something like three quarters and pesticides by well over half. Petroleum imports halved. Gross domestic product contracted by around 35 per cent between 1990 and 1993 — a peacetime collapse on the scale of the American Great Depression, compressed into three years. Fidel Castro named it the Special Period in Time of Peace, which was a euphemism doing a great deal of work. Average daily calorie availability fell from close to 2,900 in 1989 to under 1,900 by 1993. Between 1991 and 1993 more than fifty thousand Cubans developed an epidemic neuropathy that damaged the optic and peripheral nerves and in some cases took their sight; it was traced to B-vitamin deficiency, and the government eventually halted it by handing out vitamin tablets to the entire population. That is the context the raised beds belong to, and it ought to be attached to every account of them.
The oxen
Cuba had one of the most mechanised agricultures in Latin America — Soviet tractors, Soviet diesel, Soviet spare parts, all three of which stopped at once. So the state rebuilt a draught-animal capacity it had spent thirty years dismantling. Oxen were bred, teamsters were trained in schools set up for the purpose, and the national working herd went from a few tens of thousands of animals to several hundred thousand within a decade. An ox needs no imported part, burns no diesel, manures the field it is working and can go onto wet ground that would bog a tractor. It also does a fraction of the work in a day, which is the entire point and the part that never appears in the admiring version.
Nothing about it was chosen. It was a set of substitutions accepted under duress, and it was only described as a philosophy afterwards — mostly by people who had not had to eat the results.
Why the beds are in the cities
The organopónico itself is credited to the armed forces, who were growing vegetables in walled beds on their own units from about 1987 to feed themselves. After 1991 the technique was taken national: a Grupo Nacional de Agricultura Urbana was created in 1994, every municipality was given production targets, and idle urban land — car parks, demolition sites, the strips between blocks — was made available to anyone who would farm it. The reason it had to be urban is logistical rather than agronomic. A country with no fuel cannot run refrigerated lorries, and a country with no spare parts cannot keep a distribution network alive; produce grown ninety seconds from the person eating it needs neither. By the mid-2000s the national programme was reporting output in the millions of tonnes and Havana was said to be growing a very large share of its own fresh vegetables inside the city boundary. Those figures came from the same state that had set the targets, and they should be read with that in mind. What is not in dispute is physical and still visible: the beds exist, in every Cuban town, and the vegetables are sold at them.
The part that was never fixed
Urban horticulture supplies leaf vegetables, tomatoes, herbs and condiments. It does not supply rice, beans, cooking oil, wheat, milk or meat, which is where Cuban households get almost all of their calories and protein. And the binding constraint on those was never technique. It was Acopio, the state procurement monopoly, which bought from farmers at administered prices that were frequently below the cost of growing, and then moved what it had bought with a transport fleet that did not work — so crops rotted at the field edge in a country whose shops were empty. Raúl Castro attacked the land side of it in 2008 with Decree-Law 259, handing idle state land to individuals in renewable usufruct; over the following decade well over a million and a half hectares went out to something above two hundred thousand people. It did not solve the problem either, because the land arrived without credit, without inputs, without transport and, for years, without the right to sell the harvest to whoever wanted to buy it.
The reversal
The Special Period ended in the 2000s on Venezuelan oil, and where hard currency was available, fertiliser came back and conventional practice with it. The organic share of Cuban agriculture today is small. The sugar industry that once defined the island has effectively ceased: the 1989–90 harvest was above eight million tonnes, and the 2022–23 harvest came in around three hundred and fifty thousand — the smallest since the nineteenth century, and it has fallen again in every harvest since. The mills that still turn no longer cover the sugar on Cuba's own ration book, which is now imported. Cuba now imports the large majority of what it eats, an annual bill of roughly two billion dollars paid in hard currency the state does not have. In 2022 the National Assembly passed a Food Sovereignty and Nutritional Security law, the first of its kind in the country. In March 2024 the government asked the World Food Programme for powdered milk for children under seven, the first request Cuba has ever made of it.
The lesson the world took from Alamar was that a country can feed itself without agrochemicals, and Cuba never demonstrated that. What it did demonstrate is narrower, harder and more portable: when fuel and imports disappear, the part of a food system that keeps functioning is the part grown inside the settlement that eats it, because it needs no refrigeration, no diesel and no lorry. That was true in 1994 and it is true in a blackout in 2026, which is a thing that happens most weeks. The beds are still producing. What has not moved in thirty years is everything above them — who may grow, who may buy, at what price, and who is allowed to move it — and that, rather than the compost, is what decides whether there is anything on the plate.