"...fixed the price of rice in the face of an acute shortage..."
It is a known and demonstrable fact that price fixing only exacerbates shortages. The underlying and insurmountable problems of Cuba's economy, primarily the insuperable embargo by the USA, aren't soluble with such simplistic tools as price fixing, but polities just don't have other tools they can try to resolve the desperate problem.
What Cuba could do short of simply surrendering it's sovereignty and yielding to slavery to corrupt corporate overlords isn't clear. I cannot recommend slavery, as I myself would rather starve. However, I cannot say I would starve my children, and can only empathize with parents in such dire circumstances.
It is unsustainable to resort to charcoal for cooking, as is well-known, but what else can be done? Whatever development Cuba turns to the covert spooks will sabotage, and Cuba's access to it's seas are difficult to secure from such heinous enemies to develop suitable resources for it's people, while it's forests are incapable of sustaining a charcoal industry. However I look at it, decentralized adoption of aquaponics that Cuba could enable it's people to undertake to themselves provide their necessary nutrition seems to me to be the best solution potential, as the people will not tolerate their own betrayal, and even were spooks to sabotage such individual industry, their impact would be limited to such solitary endeavors as they could corrupt.
Combating the ills that are exploitable via collective institutions are best decentralized because that removes the breadth of suffering that can be caused by sabotaging centralized institutions.
Thanks!
It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the country needs to move towards the solutions you have outlined here at other times, not just aquaponics. A year ago a Cuban official spoke in this direction and people did not understand him, and rather what they did---clumsily and ignorantly---was to laugh at him. If I had the logistical capacity to introduce myself in this practice, I would assume it from now on, but I do not rule it out as conditions improve, which is what I am working for. Thanks for your always helpful feedback, my friend.
The future is an unpredictable sea. It's swells and chop cannot be predicted, except by those wizened and windblasted seamen that have surfed the swells and ridden the chop, windblown and erratic, yet able by men of long acquaintance to be at least relatively characterized. No one has a better understanding of how these markets and industries can be developed and will affect people and societies than you do, my friend. We peer into the future, and wonder what it will bring, but men brave the unknowable to undertake the first steps of epic journeys, and that is how followers in their footsteps dare to project their expectations on their own journeys after them.
I know you care for your loved ones, that you yearn for their prosperity and for them to thrive in good company in their lives ahead of them. While aquaponics isn't sexy, no shiny robots call you master and meticulously automate food production, the hanging gutters on a sunny wall fed by an aquarium bubbler from a tank of catfish or similar fish with easy diets and high tolerance for dirty water are a prospect of wealth and contentment in hard times to come.
https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/2023/01/17/aquaponics-growing-crops-open-water openly provides information that is not all that is available. A few searches of the internet will provide what there is to know today, and from there you can develop specific information regarding specific local circumstances, supplies, and practices potential there.
What Cuba, and it's sons and daughters, can make of that information is truly up to you and your fellows. Almost all of the infrastructure can be made, or salvaged from used structures being replaced. Anything that can hold enough water will suffice to keep crawdads or catfish in. The biggest expense up front is the aquarium bubbler, ~$20.
If you fail, what is the downside? Who could blame you for trying? The simplicity of beginning with a 55 gallon barrel, an aquarium bubbler, and some used gutters on a sunny wall leaves almost no prospect of failure economically. Fear of failure is certainly a worse prospect than actually failing, because the expenditures are so minimal. Other tools like 3D printers are much more expensive, although capable of far more diverse production than some hydroponic gutters fed fish waste.
When you succeed at producing delicious food from table scraps and used gutters, what you learn you can share, and then people will not laugh and misunderstand, because no one hungry misunderstands a full belly. I encourage you to risk that laughter, to brave that fear of failure, because those are surely far worse threats in your mind than your efforts will produce in practice.