Cuba, after the USSR failed, had to undergo a MASSIVE change in the way they farm. They had to turn to sustainable farming practices - and this way may be the way of the future for the world since oil-based pesticides are a large part of current agri-biz.
Bill McKibben (you can google if you want to know about his work) wrote about this situation in Harpers in 2005:
http://harpers.org/archive/2005/04/0080501Cuba became an island. Not just a real island, surrounded by water, but something much rarer: an island outside the international economic system, a moon base whose supply ships had suddenly stopped coming. There were other deeply isolated places on the planet—North Korea, say, or Burma—but not many. And so most observers waited impatiently for the country to collapse. No island is an island, after all, not in a global world. The New York Times ran a story in its Sunday magazine titled “The Last Days of Castro's Cuba”; in its editorial column, the paper opined that “the Cuban dictator has painted himself into his own corner. Fidel Castro's reign deserves to end in home-grown failure.” Without oil, even public transportation shut down—for many, going to work meant a two-hour bike trip. Television shut off early in the evening to save electricity; movie theaters went dark. Cuban caloric intake dropped drastically without oil to fuel their agriculture. But they survived.
...Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, the combination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They're still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal—they've gotten that meal back.
In so doing they have created what may be the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn't rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth. AFAIK, Cuba has not been a threat to the U.S. (via their Soviet ally) for decades. If the U.S. can become buddies with Quadaffi, I don't see why the U.S. cannot create a trading partner with Cuba. In these oil-screwed times it would be a good thing, imo, to have trading partners closer to home. Not only that, but the U.S. should stop its war on South American autonomy. As we've seen, capitalism isn't any better at staving off dictatorial actions (Bush's entire pres) or at sustaining a basic level of life for its citizens.
All the bullshit America flings at Cuba is the red meat of South Florida political right wingers. I know, I lived there and saw the reactionary Cubans I worked with - even those who never set foot in Cuba, who were born here, keep up this b.s. -- Cuba chose its form of govt. - if the Cubans here had ancestors who hadn't aligned with the mob and hadn't basically told the rural population to "eat cake," those Cubans bitching about Castro here could've stayed where they were. As it is, they lost the war, both physically and psychologically, in Cuba.
I'm sick of pandering to this hate group by U.S. politicians. There is a bigger issue at stake than the vote of the Cuban-American bloc. The issue is how to create a better world in the here and now. Cuba is no threat to us. Neither is Chavez or Morales.
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