Cuba after Peak Oil

When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the countries hardest hit was Cuba, which lost a cheap supply of oil that it had depended on and built the national economy around. Sound familiar?

This article has an interesting (if a bit wide-eyed and optimistic) account of how Cuba turned around and managed to make the transition from oil to post-oil.

This need to bring agriculture into the city began with the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of more than 50 percent of Cuba's oil imports, much of its food and 85 percent of its trade economy. Transportation halted, people went hungry and the average Cuban lost 30 pounds.

"In reality, when this all began, it was a necessity. People had to start cultivating vegetables wherever they could," a tour guide told a documentary crew filming in Cuba in 2004 to record how Cuba survived on far less oil than usual....

"Try to image an airplane suddenly losing its engines. It was really a crash," Jorge Mario, a Cuban economist, told the documentary crew. A crash that put Cuba into a state of shock. There were frequent blackouts in its oil-fed electric power grid, up to 16 hours per day. The average daily caloric intake in Cuba dropped by a third.

The solution to Cuba's agricultural collapse involved going back about a century, and using draught animals instead of tractors. Good idea, but I'm not sure how those of us who don't live in tropical socialist dictatorships will cope.