The Land of the Skinny Cow: Beef Politics in Cuba on the Eve of Revolution

Following the implementation of agrarian reform laws in 1959, a large and powerful community of critics have alleged that the Cuban Revolution destroyed the nation’s thriving cattle industry, depriving the population of its most important dietary staple: beef. This narrative, which has persisted largely unchanged over the last sixty-plus years, may sound intuitive. After all, it resonates with familiar frameworks linking free market capitalism to wealth and abundance, and Communism to poverty and scarcity. But rarely do empirical realities fit so neatly in pre-established frameworks. This paper interrogates the claim that beef scarcity in Cuba is a uniquely revolutionary problem, reframing it a forgotten front in Cold War ideological struggles. The historical record reveals that Cuba’s domestic beef industry was mired in deep-seated conflict and chronic crisis for at least two centuries preceding the triumph of the Revolution. By focusing on key moments of confrontation following the Custom-Tariff Act of 1927, I show how struggles over beef became central to Cuban politics in the decades preceding the 1959 Cuban Revolution.