Cuba's land distribution plan keeps farmers waiting

LAS GUASIMAS, Cuba (AFP) – Idalmis Garcia is on the cutting edge of Cuba's bid to boost food production and proudly shows off the small plot of land President Raul Castro's government put her to work on. Now she wants more.

"I asked for as big a piece of land as they could give me, but they gave me 0.95 hectares (two acres), which is not too much, so I applied for more and I've been waiting months for an answer," Garcia, 39, told AFP, standing amid the goats and sheep she tends on her spread at a former military base just south of Havana.

She is one of 78,113 Cubans who have jumped at the chance to cash in on a law that took effect in September 2008 to try to boost homegrown farm output.

More than 60 percent of cash-strapped Cuba's arable land, which totals 1.6 million hectares (3.9 million acres) lies fallow, in a country roughly the size of Portugal, or the US state of Virginia.

And the Americas' only one-party communist regime spends about 2.8 billion dollars a year importing food for its population of more than 11 million and well over a million tourists.

Adding insult to injury, three major hurricanes ravaged Cuba last year leaving 10 billion dollars in damage and seriously harming many crops and farm animals.

While a great deal of abandoned farmland in Cuba is covered with dense tropicsignal scrub brush, Garcia and her family have been making the best of their New Deal.

Farmers work the land but do not own it outright. The Garcia family have turned a former military barracks on an ex-base into a small home surrounded by corrals.

Official media say the government has handed out 689,697 hectares (1.6 million acres) -- 41 percent of the total Havana plans to distribute, and that 25 percent is already being farmed.

Garcia's lot however is not as easy as many of the 100,000 private farmers whose productivity is higher and do not have such tough brush to contend with.

Many of them have family plots that were small enough that they were not confiscated by the government after the 1959 revolution.

All of them have their eye on producing for themselves -- and bringing any surplus to market in crowded Havana and other cities.

So land which lies a manageable driving distance from Havana is very much in demand, and a cornerstone of Garcia's strategy.

She says she would like