• Submitted by: manso
• Business and Economy
• 10 / 14 / 2010

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A day after running an article on the obstacles startup private farmers are facing in Guantánamo province, official daily Juventud Rebelde published a report suggesting that 100,000 Cubans have moved into farming recently.

Some skeptics didn’t believe that many Cubans would want to till the soil, but 100,000, including 30,000 young people, have started careers in agriculture, Vice President Ulises Rosales del Toro said during a Communist Youth meeting in Pinar del Río, according to Juventud Rebelde.

As part of an effort to make Cuba’s dysfunctional economy sustainable, the government is laying off some 500,000 state workers, with the ultimate goal to have 80 percent of the workforce directly linked to production.

While some 250,000 of the unemployed are expected to get into self-employment in the cities, the government would like to see many shift to agriculture. The government has encouraged private farming, granting long-term leases for more than 1 million hectares of state land to individual farmers and cooperatives since 2008.

On Sunday, Juventud Rebelde published an investigative report that described the experiences of a handful startup farmers in eastern Guantánamo province. For two of the farmers, according to the report, the process has been very difficult because others claimed the piece of land allotted to them, after they had already invested a lot of work in clearing it.

Source: www.cubastandard.com/2010/10/12/