Computer-age Comes to Cuba, But the Real Revolution is on the Land

It has been a week of announcements for Cubans from their new president Raúl Castro and on Friday shoppers gathered in Havana malls to gaze for the first time at computers legally on sale. The computers cost almost £400 and the average wage is under £10 a month, so most were just looking.

But it is the other, less flashy reforms that may bring a more profound impact - reforms intended to breathe life into Cuba's economy by giving farmers incentives and freedoms. At May Day celebrations the government announced it was shifting control from the ossified agriculture ministry to 169 local delegations. In a further assault on bureaucracy, it may abolish 104 unnecessary departments.

The Communist party newspaper Granma said the move was needed to 'stimulate agricultural production, perfect its sale and increase the availability of food and, in this way, substitute imports'. Salvador Valdes Mesa, head of the Cuban Workers' Confederation, reinforced the point. 'It is fundamental to concentrate efforts on increasing production and productivity, above all of food,' he said.

The government has signalled a transfer of land to private farmers, who are quietly recognised to be far more productive than state-owned enterprises. The state, which controls 90 per cent of the economy, is to further loosen its grip by allowing farmers to buy supplies directly. It has also doubled and in some cases tripled the prices it pays for some produce.

With Havana's hungry people packed on the plain below, 38-year-old Abel was having a bad day. Two oxen were working a field of potatoes but a rod on the plough kept snagging in the soil. Abel had no wrench or hammer so he did what his Old Testament namesake might have done. He picked up a rock and bashed the offending equipment. Cuban agriculture is a disaster. Farms like this - a collective-run enterprise - lack not only tractors but basic tools. This is a fertile Caribbean island littered with dysfunctional farms which cannot feed the 11 million population, let alone export.

The three biggest successes of the communist revolution are health, education and sport, goes the old joke, and the three biggest failures are breakfast, lunch and dinner. That could change. If Raúl Castro succeeds in boosting agriculture he will bolster the post-Fidel transition. Nobody starves but most Cubans struggle for decent nutrition. Farmers are strangled by red tape requiring permission to buy as much as a hoe. 'The handcuffs are being taken off, though there is still a ball and chain around the ankles,' said one foreign expert in the capital. Some 150,000 individual farms and co-operatives are estimated to produce two-thirds of Cuba's food using just a third of the workable land. Anaemic state farms occupy the rest.

The government has experimented with reforms before, notably after the 1991 collapse of its Soviet benefactor, only to row back to Fidel Castro orthodoxy. Since stripping large landholdings in 1959, starting with his father's estate, the maximum commandante was loath to relinquish state control.

Now Fidel is 81, ailing and eclipsed by the more pragmatic Raúl, the brother inaugurated as President last February. Raúl has studied China and Vietnam, where the regimes have retained political control while freeing the economy. He wants changes to boost output: 'The land is there to be tilled ... We must offer producers adequate incentives.'

Cuba imports 80 per cent of its basic food with a third coming from the United States, which exempts food from its economic embargo. The imports cost £800m annually, a drain on state coffers set to worsen as global prices rise.

Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuba expert at Pittsburgh University, fears that the reforms do not go far enough. 'Many Cuban economists believe that in agriculture, only market mechanisms and foreign investment will prove able to truly overcome stagnation,' he said. But the mood among farmers was upbeat. 'We have been waiting for this for so long,' said Luis Pi, head of a co-operative growing vegetables. 'We can do it if they let us. Come back in a few months. You'll see.'