Three hundred years ago, Cuba’s Spanish colonizers deliberately planted a kind of acacia typical of arid regions of Spain along riverbanks: they acted on the arrogant assumption that doing so would prevent rivers from overflowing their banks during Caribbean hurricanes. Enslaved Africans later renamed it marabú after beating the quickly growing, voracious plant back became a grueling task for all farm laborers, on and off sugar plantations. Today, as in the 1990s, the massive trunks and wall-like impenetrability of fields of marabú that run all the way up to roadsides speak to the extraordinary amount of land that has remained fallow long after peasants surrendered it to the state and decades after it was supposed to be put into production under government control. In many ways, marabú is a witness to two related phenomena: first, the Communist government’s long-term inability to stimulate the productivity and efficiency of the labor force even at the height of Communism in the 1970s and 80s when Soviet subsidies ensured basic needs; and second, a deliberate policy of refusing to turn unused lands over to peasant production because allowing peasants to prosper would inevitably jeopardize other citizens’ dependence on the state for food rations (and therefore the state’s degree of political control).
