My father’s brother Pucho returned to subsistence farming full time in 1991 after government-owned farms began closing one by one in the wake of disappearing Soviet aid and subsidies. Like his horse (who lost twenty pounds in less than a year), Pucho also lost weight, precipitously. Only sixty years old in 1995, he looked like a man in his eighties, another sign of how hard work not only defined life for many in rural Cuba, but it also consumed them.
