Reactions to the Market: Small Farmers in the Economic Reshaping of Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, and China

Introduction

Introduction The year  was a turning point in both Nicaragua and Cuba. That year witnessed the electoral loss of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which had sought to move Nicaragua in the direction of socialism following the overthrow of the Somoza regime in . The election results forecast a major shift in the government’s reigning political economy, one characterized by a rapid retreat from socialism toward a ‘‘social economy of the market.’’1 True to its electoral platform, the government that assumed power in , which was headed by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, quickly moved policy making toward a full embrace of capitalism. In Cuba, it was not a change of political regime that triggered the modification of that country ’s socialist political economy. Rather, the economic crisis that was provoked by the disintegration of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON—the Soviet-led trade bloc) forced the reconfiguration of what had heretofore been Cuban socialism. The contrasting political economic orientations adopted in the s by these two formerly allied governments resulted in the pursuit of distinct economic strategies. As part of Nicaragua’s rapid retreat from socialism, a comprehensive program of economic stabilization and structural adjustment (SA) was put in place. In Cuba, the economic crisis led to the implementation of SA-like measures in several sectors of the economy. Yet policy in . See further UNO ().      some other sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, was notably different from that typically associated with SA. Logically, their respective strategies had varying consequences for certain sectors of their populations. One of these sectors was that involved in agricultural production. The Chamorro government in Nicaragua largely patterned its policies according to the model set forth by the proponents of orthodox SA programs . As a result, it followed the path taken by most other Latin American governments beginning in the s. The assumption behind that model was that the principal cause of the economic troubles facing many countries in the Global South was the economic approach they had employed for the previous few decades. That approach, known as import substitution industrialization (ISI), had prioritized moving their economies away from complete reliance on the export of primary products to also producing their own industrial goods, even if that required some degree of protectionism in the early stages of the push to industrialize. The state had played a crucial role in this effort to diversify production. Proponents of SA argued that the Global South’s nascent industrial sectors were being maintained artificially by the state, which was creating an unsustainable economic situation. By interfering with the market, these states were keeping afloat nonviable industries and causing disequilibria throughout their economies. The answer was, then, to restructure (or ‘‘adjust ’’ the structure of) these economies so that they would once again experience growth, which was best done by emphasizing what they had produced historically—products for export. Within Nicaragua’s SA program, export production was to be prioritized. Within agriculture, export products were to be the focus of attention. As a result, domestically oriented production—which was the specialty of small farmers, who made up close to  percent of the country’s agriculturalists in 2 —found itself relegated to a distant second place in terms of the government’s resource allocations. This situation, combined with other aspects of SA, led to the increased marginalization of this sector of producers. Their marginalization translated into a growth in the numbers of rural dwellers living in poverty and to the concentration of land, the key indicator of wealth in the countryside. Conversely, within the context of the reform that was designed to address Cuba’s economic crisis, agricultural producers—particularly those who em- . CIPRES (, ).   phasized food production—became a select group of beneficiaries of the government ’s limited resources. This was, in good measure, a consequence of Cuba’s need to achieve greater self-sufficiency, especially in food, given the extreme shortages that resulted when its trade relations fell into disarray. Moreover, through various means, much of Cuban agriculture was downsized (i.e., the scale of units of production was reduced) and smaller-scale production gained new prominence in policy making toward this sector. Hence, the cooperative and small private farm sectors of agriculture—which were responsible for approximately  percent of the production of Cuba’s principal food products in  (calculated from Tables .. and ..)— were given priority. Their relatively better-off economic situation compared with most of...