Movie Review: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

…Along those lines, Cuba has not produced anything nearly resembling adequate food supplies. As an October 2006 WaPo article makes clear, shortages of food remain widespread, leading to a thriving black market. This suggests that while Cuba’s sustainable ag practices have averted widespread famine, fundamental problems remain. The US embargo is clearly a major culprit in this, as our country persists in what Cuban National Assembly leader Ricardo Alarcon rightly calls an “equivalent to genocide.”

Because of the embargo and the shortage of export goods (the lack of oil decimated Cuban manufacturing), Cuba has a huge need for hard currency. To get this, Cuba has opened itself up to tourism, creating luxurious resorts and “dollar stores” that only allow foreigners inside. While Cubans wait in long lines for limited food supplies, the tourists get abundance. This policy has been decried as tourist apartheid by Cubans and other observers. In its defense, Cuban officials say there is no other way to provide the nation with hard currency, and that to shut out the tourists would be to consign more Cubans to starvation. One scholar has said this “two-tier” system might be a kind of permanent return to the pre-1959 society in Cuba of widespread poverty amidst grotesque scenes of tourist plenty.

Clearly, Cuba has not solved its problems, and the sustainable responses it has crafted to deal with its version of peak oil have been unable to sustain a basic standard of living. An end to the US embargo would likely go a very long way toward helping Cuba survive, but since this might also mean the survival of a socialist regime, the US will likely maintain the embargo until a pliant, US-friendly government takes power in Havana.

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