Methodological Considerations on the Experience of Undertaking Doctoral Research in the Agricultural Sector in Cuba during the Special Period (1998-2000)

IntroductionIt was in about 1992 that I first became interested in Cuba from a professional perspective; rumour had it that Cuba was 'going organic' owing to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was working in international agricultural development and had from the outset aligned with organic farming approaches. If a whole nation were practising organic farming, this would clearly have major implications for the rest of the world's farming and food systems and especially in terms of food security, sustainable agriculture and human health. If this was not happening in Cuba, then begged the question 'Why not?' From that point of first interest, and notwithstanding the supposed interest of the global agricultural sector in sustainability, it took 6 years to secure the funding to undertake doctoral research in Cuba, finally receiving support through the EU Marie Curie Training and Mobility of Researchers Awards.2 My overall research objective was to evaluate the implications for both the agricultural sector and the food system, of the impact of a widespread reduction in the petroleum-based inputs that Cuban agriculture was dependent on, drawing from the Cuban experience.3This article aims to describe the methodological challenges encountered in attempting to undertake research in Cuba, and the often serendipitous ways in which these challenges were overcome. Along the way, I encountered the struggles of numerous Cuban researchers who were attempting to continue their work during the resource-poor Special Period. Some Cuban colleagues have informally, and politely, contested my interpretation of the 'snapshot' of the farming and food systems that I documented, and each of them has a different perspective of 'the real situation'. Nevertheless, the book that emerged as an adaptation of my doctoral thesis4 has become a seminal text not only for students but also for civil society groups working for change toward more sustainable systems that are less dependent on fossil fuels.Methodological Considerations of a Cautious Doctoral StudentAny attempt to evaluate the farming and food system over a whole country is ambitious, especially when the country is relatively secluded and reticent, as was the case for this research. Notwithstanding the extensive research planning that took place, the final research design developed as an emergent product of the research process, rather than through rigid adherence to a fixed framework. In particular, it was governed in practice by the opportunities encountered in the field, which in turn affected not only the methodology but also the development of the analytical framework, which in turn was influenced by the author's background in applied development research and her university research department's focus on Innovation, Communication and Knowledge Systems (at Wageningen University).Much secondary information was unavailable to the author pre-field, given the 2 to 5 year time lag of publications coming out of Cuba, and the unavailability of data. Rosset comments in relation to data access: 'Obtaining any figures at all is very difficult, owing to the longstanding reluctance of the Cuban government to release them and to post-crisis cutbacks in data compilation and publishing' (1996: 67). Mesa-Lago (1998), in an attempt to assess the economic and social performance of the Cuban transition in the 1990s, notes in relation to Cuban data that 'Statistical series vanished at the beginning of the transition, making a serious evaluation virtually impossible. In 1995-97, important data were released but their reliability is questionable' (857).Both the shortage of available data and uncertain research circumstances within Cuba meant that a reference framework was developed rather than an a priori hypothesis. In this case, grounded theory was considered the most appropriate theoretical approach for dealing with such empirical uncertainties (Strauss and Corbin 1990). For this study, grounded theory (the generation of theory from research) could be used to evaluate the validity of secondary information on the state-of-the-art of agriculture in Cuba, to draw in empirical evidence on coping strategies employed by both people and institutions, and to elaborate and modify existing theory on ecological agriculture and food security. …