STARTING FROM SCRATCH: When Soviet support stopped coming, Cubans learned to grow food the way people grew it thousands of years ago.
Cuba is not a free country. It’s hard to get around the fact that life is controlled by the state, and with that fact come many problems. There is a sense of collective unhappiness, even despair, which I would attribute to a basic lack of human agency. Economically, Cuba imports 84 percent of its food supply, including most of its meat and nearly all of its grain. That puts Cuba in the same food security category as Haiti, at least in terms of its reliance on foreign soil for nourishment.
Organic by necessity
The Cuban Agro-Ecological Revolution: A Look Behind the Curtain
After a few shots of freshly squeezed sugarcane juice, we follow Miguel Salcines Lopez into the fields of what is the most stunning urban farm I have ever seen: Vivero Alamar in Havana, Cuba. The produce list is long: guavas, mangos, sugar cane, noni, figs, papaya, grapes, avocadoes, and citrus, not to mention dozens of vegetable and medicinal crops.