Cuba's food sovereignty intermediaries

Against the backdrop of colonial sugar exports, US and Soviet patronage, and the austerity of the Special Period, Cuba's pursuit of food sovereignty remains a work in progress. The government's 2021 food sovereignty policy adds nuance to the term by foregrounding nutritional and cultural diversity to combat the unhealthy options served up by an emerging private sector. Food sovereignty's shifting significance through history does not undermine its efficacy; rather, it furnishes narratives that appeal to a wide range of local and foreign actors: about revolutionary struggle, entrepreneurial initiative, personal and ecological health, and the need to counterbalance growing Chinese influence. Case studies of organic farms in inner‐city and peri‐urban Havana show intermediaries historicizing food sovereignty across scales and networks to reconcile the sensibilities of neighbours, officials, and foreign visitors. I argue that how these intermediaries temporalize the term – as a static and patriotic Cuban tradition in the first case, and as a dynamic process of political reform in the second – influences the structure of international networks and corresponding understandings of its meaning. This observation helps answer the question posed by Marc Edelman et al. in 2014: ‘Who is the sovereign in food sovereignty?’. I suggest that who the sovereign is depends on why they join networks, and that intermediaries amplify and harmonize their motivations for doing so. The international appeal of Cuban food sovereignty is therefore culturally contingent, but it is not coincidental.