CUBA-POPULATION: Rural Life Lacks Attractions for Urbanites

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Feb 7 1996 (IPS) - The Cuban government must improve rural living conditions to promote agriculture and achieve self- sufficiency in food, according to official experts.

The times of the great agricultural movement have passed, the city-dwellers do not want to go back to the land, and voluntary workers cannot fill the gap, they said.

Preliminary results from a national migration survey showed that for the Cuban countryside to reach its full potential, the exodus to the cities must be stemmed.

This study, funded by the United Nations Population Fund, examined the work and living conditions of the lower strata, seeking ways to stabilise their situation.

Blanca Morejon, from the Demography department of Havana, said the migration survey analyses both the origins and destinations of the migrants. Previous investigations showed the demographic structure of the poor rural settlements to be weak, hence the emigration of 30,000 people per year to the cities.

Cuban planners class any village of over 200 people as a “rural settlement”- any smaller hamlet, or area of dispersed settlements are entirely beyond the reach of the political and administrative networks.

Sources in the Institute of Physical Planning (IPF) said the four million Cubans living in rural areas should be able to fill the gaps in the agricultural work market. The lack of agricultural workers, however, has been one of the toughest problems facing Cuban authorities as they have tried to lead a mainly agricultural economy forward over the last few years.

For decades the government relied on teams of students and urban workers to bring in the tobacco, citrus and potato harvests. Around 2,000 professionals, technicians and qualified workers normally abandoned this key sector of the economy at the end of every sugar harvest, according to trade union spources.

“Trabajadores,” the weekly magazine of the Cuban Workers Centre, recently said that there were 200,000 empty posts in the sugar and other agricultural sectors.

This announcement coincided with a strong official campaign which told the population there were half a million excess workers in the State sector. For a nation where sugar is the main export, a rural population density of 25.6 people per square kilometre compares with 3,895 per square kilometre in the cities.

Local specialists said the lack of agricultural workforce is not only due to the population being small and dispersed, but because people do not find the work attractive.

The government is now aiming to improve housing and other rural conditions to try and stimulate the sector, they have even offered people the use of stretches of land to plant tobacco, coffee, cocoa and other foods.

Minister of Economy, Jose Luis Rodriguez, said that in the 1993 to 1995 period, some 30,000 families took up this offer.

After thirty years of State domination in Cuban agriculture, two years of a new policy have changed the land ownership profile, and cooperative land ownership has increased from 12 percent to 64 percent of the countryside. But the return to the land so far is insufficient to meet the needs of a national agriculture which has suffered the ravages of decades of urban migration.