Cuba: Affordable Produce Coming Mostly from Privately-Owned Farms

You've seen them in the United States before, a farmer setting up produce for sale in their front yards giving you the opportunity to get some good homegrown vegetables and fruits for inexpensive prices. While this may be considered as a simple opportunity in our country it is not considered to be in Cuba. There it is considered to some as a life or death situation.

The Associated Press reported that 15 years ago after the Soviet Union collapsed the food situation was in a dire situation. Today due to these organized produce fairs that the government holds once a month the food situation is getting better, although leaders of the communist party remain unsatisfied with the situation. The AP also reports that almost $1.6 billion on food imports are spent each year with around 33% coming from the United States. The money spent is due in part to the 7% drop in production of food in 2006.

One of the issues that many Americans have is not truly getting a sense of how astonishing situations are in other countries simply because we are accustomed to how life works in the United States. So it may not matter to some if Anita Snow from the Associated Press translates what she saw in Havana as a 60-year-old man rolled around a wheelbarrow through the fair with two large branches of plantains (plants that hold fruits such as bananas). He was able to purchase these at a reasonable price to feed his five grandchildren.

We have it so easy in the U.S. and things are easily taken for granted. However, another person Snow saw was a woman that had an old shopping cart filled with strings of garlic, a couple plantains as well, and a huge slab of cake. People using baby strollers, milk cartons on bicycles and anything else they could use to get as much food as they could possibly afford home to their families. Its stories like these that help some to appreciate their life the way it is just a little more.

Many of the problems have stemmed from government land that is rich in soil and could potentially be productive farming land is not being used. Then there is constant spoilage that is due to transportation issues along with state agencies lack of coordinating proper pick-ups writes the Communist Party newspaper Granma according to the Associated Press. Currently there are 150,000 farmers and others producing 66% of the food with only 33% of the land.

The Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4921659.html