Agriculture in Cuba
Open-knowledge reference entry
Agriculture in Cuba has played an important part in the economy for several hundred years. Today, it contributes less than 10% to the gross domestic product (GDP), but it employs about 20% of the working population. About 30% of the country's land is used for crop cultivation.
History
Cuba's agricultural history can be divided into five periods, reflecting Cuban history in general:
Precolonial Cuba (before 1492)
Spanish colonial Cuba (1492–1902)
Republic of Cuba (1902–1959)
Cuba under Fidel Castro, pre-dissolution of the Soviet Union (1959–1992)
Special Period (1993–present)
During each of these periods, agriculture in Cuba has confronted unique obstacles.
Agriculture in Spanish colonial Cuba resulted in rapid deforestation. Naval and agricultural enterprises both needed wood and in 1815 the Spanish Crown gave sugar planters the right to clear land at will. Large amounts of forests were cleared to provide land for growing sugarcane and top use wood for energy in mills.
Before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the agricultural sector in Cuba was largely oriented towards and dominated by the US economy. The revolutionary government seized all large private and foreign plantations and distributed the seized lands to approximately 200,000 farmers who received title to the small parcels on this they worked. The remaining land was organized into state-controlled cooperatives in 1961 and in 1962 cooperatives were converted into state farms with cooperative members becoming state employees.
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This entry incorporates text from “Agriculture in Cuba” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.