A vacant lot next to a
factory on 114th Street in the western Havana neighborhood of
Marianao has become a six-day-a-week wholesale market where farmers and
cooperatives sell fresh produce every night to retail vendors, private
restauranteurs, and anyone else willing to buy beans by the quintal instead of the pound.
The market started
spontaneously in September 2011. The
local government gave its blessing six months later, and the whole operation
will soon move a few miles south to a government facility that will be
organized and run by a new private cooperative.
A sign says that the
market’s hours are 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m.
When I visited a few weeks ago there were 72 trucks parked in formation
at 7:00 p.m., and more arriving. They
came from all over – Artemisa, Matanzas, Pinar del Rio, even as far away as
Cabaiguan in Sancti Spiritus province.
Dozens of fruit and
vegetable varieties were on sale, including lots of sweet-smelling
pineapples. Black beans that sell in
town at retail for 15 pesos per pound were going for nine pesos per pound in
hundred-pound bags. Young men make a
little money carting customers’ purchases to their cars nearby. All the vendors chip in to pay four guys who
clean up the lot in the morning.
At the gate, a
municipal official notes the content of each truck that comes in, and his rough
tally is fed to the office that keeps farm production statistics. As more and more produce is sold on the open
market instead of through the old state contracting system, some believe that
government statistics are not capturing all private sales and are becoming less
accurate.
As an economic
phenomenon, wholesale sales aren’t new in socialist Cuba.
They were part of a
brief free-market produce experiment in the 1980’s that fell victim to a Fidel
Castro campaign against “errors and negative tendencies.”
Since 1994, trucked-in
wholesale produce, about two thirds of it from private producers, has been the
backbone of Cuba’s current farmers markets.
They would arrive in cities in the predawn hours to sell to retail
vendors, which was not exactly legal since those vendors were supposed to be
the farmers themselves or their designated representatives. Only once in memory was that rule enforced,
with predictably disastrous results and only for a few days.
What is new today is
that the state is now supporting private sales as it shrinks the acopio, the web of state enterprises
that contracts, buys, transports, warehouses, and distributes food. (A retiree in central Cuba told me,
regretfully, that the enterprise where he once worked is being dismantled, with
workers being laid off and its trucks being sold to private farm
cooperatives.) The government used to
buy 85 percent of farmers’ output; that share is now down to about 60 percent,
and the goal is to reduce it to about 35 percent. The remaining government network that will
serve hospitals, prisons, and schools, with the rest of the food supply moving
through private channels. Eventually
even the libreta, the household food
ration book instituted 50 years ago as a temporary measure, will disappear.
The phrase “cutting
edge” doesn’t come to mind when we see an open produce market, a common feature
of nearly every economy. But this market
represents the slow but steady change in Cuba’s farm sector. Under new policies, the government is
reducing micro-management of farmers and buying less from them, downsizing its
own distribution network, and trusting the market eventually to assume the
predominant role in pricing and distributing the island’s food supply. It’s a sign of a new direction that when this
Havana market popped up in a vacant lot, the government ignored it, then embraced
it and looked for a vacant government facility where a private cooperative
would run it, under a roof to shelter everyone from the rain.
