Originally Posted at Blue House Diaries
Last night I checked out from my local library a film called The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. The film covers the Cuban response to the "Special Period", when oil imports were cut by over 50%, leaving the nation on the verge of total collapse.
What does the film teach us about how to respond to our own looming oil crisis? How has Cuba adapted to face the challenge, and have they been successful in doing so? Does Cuba offer any lessons to us gringos? All these and more in extended...
Overview
The film is a production of The Community Solution to Peak Oil. Founded in 1940, the group has recently reoriented itself to face the looming challenge of Peak Oil, emphasizing community and local solutions of a sustainable nature. This documentary specifically grew out of a desire of some Community Solution members to learn more about Cuba's experiences during the Special Period in the early 1990s, and was filmed in Cuba during 2004.
At the outset of the film is a very good overview of the concept of "peak oil," presented in a way similar to Al Gore's presentation of climate change in An Inconvenient Truth. The filmmakers do an excellent job of showing how Americans had already faced energy shortages in the 1970s, and how Carter had helped to create plans for America to reduce its dependence on oil and shift to alternatives. Of course, when Reagan got elected, he told Americans that the only problem was that people were pointing out problems. In an excellent turn of phrase, the narrator says "it was morning in America, and America went to sleep."
From there the film shifts to Cuba itself and explains their problems that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of cheap oil imports and a guaranteed market for Cuban products. But as the film makes clear, this was not the only thing responsible for the "Special Period" - in 1992 the US tightened its embargo in Cuba, kicking the nation while it was down, leading to a further disruption of trade and shortages of basic foodstuffs and supplies.
One of the strongest aspects of the film is how well it shows the centrality of oil to modern life. Losing oil means not just problems for auto transport, but massive problems for agriculture. Our food is almost totally dependent on oil and natural gas - to power tractors, for fertilizer, to bring food to market. Most of Cuba's electricity was generated from hydrocarbons, and with widespread blackouts, not only did the economy suffer, but so did food. Without refrigeration, food must be eaten soon after it is harvested or else it would spoil.
According to the film, Cubans were on the edge of starvation - child malnutrition was rampant and the average Cuban lost 20 pounds. It was at this point that a spontaneous response from the Cuban people helped avert disaster. From the bottom up - from the "foodroots" we might call it - people began reclaiming land, whether it be vacant lots or rooftops, and began growing vegetables on them. The government, facing the worst crisis since 1962, gave support to this effort.
Cuba's agricultural response had three main pillars - emphasizing urban food production, sustainability, and land use. Urban food production was key to survival - food now had to be grown locally because of the high costs of transportation. The filmmakers argue this was a net positive because it fostered better community relationships, and ultimately made healthier communities as veggies became the core of the Cuban diet.
Sustainable practices were a necessity as well, and Cubans re-learned the importance of "working with nature instead of against it," as one Cuban says in the film. Here we see the importance of recovering lost knowledge - only elderly farmers remembered how to train and use oxen, so they were employed to train others. Monoculture was abandoned in favor of biodiversity, a vivid demonstration of what cookiebear described today.
Land use and ownership was also a key element. Large state collective farms, a legacy from the Khrushchev era, were broken up and given to smaller farmers and co-ops, on the condition that they be used to grow food for the nation.
The film also touches on other issues Cuba had to face, from education to transportation, but agriculture and food are at its core.
Analysis
Cuba's story offers some important insights for us in the US that face peak oil. There will NOT be any way we can innovate in order to sustain the current lifestyles we have, and the more we insist on CAFOs and SUVs and massive sprawl, the sooner we'll be at a crisis point.
One thing that is made clear by the film is the overriding importance of locality. In the US in 1800 it cost more to ship goods 10 miles overland than it did to ship them 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. It was oil that made it cheap to send goods overland, made it possible to do so quickly. Our present food delivery systems rely on oil to bring our food to us at virtually every step of the way, whether it's an oil-powered cargo ship delivering fruits from South America, or a truck hauling lettuce from Salinas to Boston. Once the oil is gone, we will become MUCH more dependent on what is immediately around us to survive.
At the same time, we cannot build a new ag infrastructure overnight. As several scenes in the film make quite clear, decades of chemical-based farming methods have left most of the soil in a damaged state. To return nutrients to the soil takes a while - up to 5 years in some cases. The sooner we act, the better off we will be.
None of this would have been possible in Cuba without the government. As urban residents in Havana and elsewhere reclaimed vacant land for gardening, government had to sanction this practice. In the US, land ownership might make it difficult for quick and rapid conversion of urban land in such a manner, and we can expect our government to do what it has always done - side with property over people. Cuba also imposes a rationing system to prevent hoarding and to try and ensure the food that they now produce reaches as many people as possible. In the US, where such government actions are seen as alien, we can expect much more of a free for all.
Criticisms
While it is a fascinating insight to the ways Cuba has dealt with the oil crisis, the film leaves out some important topics. The filmmakers want to show a positive and inspirational story, but that is not the entire story either.
Politics are left out of the film almost entirely. In order to get permission to film in Cuba this was almost certainly a necessary move. And in some ways it strengthens the film, as it focuses just on the agricultural and lifestyle changes without getting into the contentious issue of Fidel Castro.
As a socialist I am inclined to support Castro and the Cuban Revolution. But neither am I blind to its problems, and as noted above, the role of government was essential to the development of Cuba's sustainable practices. Politics matters a great deal in responding to peak oil, and I would have been curious to see how the Cuban state helped or hindered this response, some sense of the range of debate, such as it may have been.
Along those lines, Cuba has not produced anything nearly resembling adequate food supplies. As an October 2006 WaPo article makes clear, shortages of food remain widespread, leading to a thriving black market. This suggests that while Cuba's sustainable ag practices have averted widespread famine, fundamental problems remain. The US embargo is clearly a major culprit in this, as our country persists in what Cuban National Assembly leader Ricardo Alarcón rightly calls an "equivalent to genocide."
Because of the embargo and the shortage of export goods (the lack of oil decimated Cuban manufacturing), Cuba has a huge need for hard currency. To get this, Cuba has opened itself up to tourism, creating luxurious resorts and "dollar stores" that only allow foreigners inside. While Cubans wait in long lines for limited food supplies, the tourists get abundance. This policy has been decried as tourist apartheid by Cubans and other observers. In its defense, Cuban officials say there is no other way to provide the nation with hard currency, and that to shut out the tourists would be to consign more Cubans to starvation. One scholar has said this "two-tier" system might be a kind of permanent return to the pre-1959 society in Cuba of widespread poverty amidst grotesque scenes of tourist plenty.
Clearly, Cuba has not solved its problems, and the sustainable responses it has crafted to deal with its version of peak oil have been unable to sustain a basic standard of living. An end to the US embargo would likely go a very long way toward helping Cuba survive, but since this might also mean the survival of a socialist regime, the US will likely maintain the embargo until a pliant, US-friendly government takes power in Havana.
How Cuba Survived Peak Oil is a title that should therefore be taken quite literally. Cuba DID survive; mass starvation and social collapse was averted. And yet little else positive seems to have been accomplished, as shortages are still common, and nobody can seriously believe a black market or a tourist-dependent economy are paths to a decent standard of living.
Still, it's a film worth watching.