Every time Gator ejaculated, Dan Marvel grossed 10 grand. At the time of his death last year, the bull was a ton and a half of genetic perfection—or as close to it as has ever been recorded for his breed (Red Brangus, a dewlapped, humpbacked strain, three-eighths Brahman, five-eighths Angus and usually russet in hue, hence the name). And he was prolific: Marvel, his owner, says with pride that Gator once produced more than 400 “straws”—a half-cubic-centimeter swizzle stick of bull semen being the standard measure—from a single ejaculation.
Gator's semen was white gold because, drop for drop, the seed of a prize-winning bull is worth more than gasoline, penicillin and human blood combined. It's not the most valuable liquid in existence (that distinction goes to scorpion venom, which has medicinal properties), but it's close.
Five years ago, Marvel received an intriguing phone call from John Parke Wright, a wealthy investor from Naples, Florida. Wright knew someone who wanted to create a beef cattle herd, and his client needed a hefty amount of Gator's semen: thousands of straws. The deal would earn Marvel and his wife, Sandra, $50,000, a huge haul for them. The only catch: They had to make it happen in one of the least business-friendly places on earth: the communist island of Cuba.
Six months after that chat, the Marvels were in Havana. They met Wright at a nondescript office building in Miramar, the city's diplomatic quarter, which serves as the headquarters of the National Enterprise for the Protection of Flora and Fauna, the Cuban equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. A receptionist led them to a small conference room with a dark wood table and chairs, the walls lined with portraits of the Castros and other Cuban leaders. As they sipped espresso and bottled water, an elderly Cuban official walked into the room and greeted them. He kissed both of Sandra's cheeks—“the Latin kind of kiss,” as she describes it. His name was Guillermo García Frías, a comandante in the Cuban army who fought alongside the Castros during the revolution, a former vice president and current head of the environmental agency.
García, who reportedly saved Fidel Castro’s life during the revolution, is Cuba’s canniest cattleman, Wright says. He had a new ranch called El Macho, he told the Marvels, and he wanted to turn it into the first large-scale, high-quality beef production operation on the island in more than five decades. He had the land: 150,000 acres in Camagüey. What he didn’t have: cows or capital.
There are two ways to increase the size of a herd. Go the natural route (put bulls and heifers together and wait), which can take years, or import a large number of heifers (20,000 would suffice, Wright ventures) and artificially inseminate them—but that method can take a lot of cash. “We're talking about a serious investment,” he says.
Still, García chose the latter option. A couple of weeks after meeting with the comandante, the Marvels received in the mail a check for about $50,000. What García got in exchange was more than just spunk; it could be the seeds of a capitalist revolution.
¿Dónde Está la Carne?
In Cuba, shortages—from toothpaste to toilet paper—are a fact of life. Food is no exception. Beef, once a staple of the Cuban diet, can be next to impossible to find on the island. Sometimes, it will disappear from markets without warning for months, says Alexis Naranjo, whose restaurant, Los Naranjos, recently debuted in Havana's tony Vedado neighborhood. “I can’t sell it,” he says, because “there isn't any place to buy it.” When you can find it, it’s exorbitantly expensive, which means tourists are among the few people in Cuba who consume it.
Like most restaurant owners here, Naranjo sometimes turns to the thriving black market to meet his needs. But he won't buy beef there. “If you get meat and the police find out, they will close the restaurant,” he says. It's not that the government is concerned about the health ramifications of eating black market beef, which is mostly pilfered from state-run butcher shops. It’s because beef is so scarce, the government controls who gets carne and who doesn't. To protect its monopoly, the state even passed legislation making slaughtering cattle without explicit government permission a crime carrying a sentence of up to five years in prison—even if you own the cow.
The shortage is worse outside the major cities. And the contrast between meat served at Havana's privately owned restaurants and what rural Cubans eat is “shocking,” says Parr Rosson, head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University and an expert on U.S.-Cuba trade. “There are cuts of chicken you can't identify,” he says. “I don't know what they are.”
Cubans would like less mystery in their meat, but change happens slowly on the island. Un poco, un poco, “a little, a little,” as people here like to say. But it's happening, especially with respect to the United States: In April 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama took the tentative first steps to ease the tension between the two countries. The administration lifted restrictions barring Cuban-Americans from traveling to the island and uncapped the amount of money they could send to relatives back home. Havana later implemented reforms designed to encourage small pockets of capitalism. In 2010, the government began allowing more Cubans to work for themselves and to hire others. Since then, the number of small-business owners and entrepreneurs has more than tripled, according to one recent paper.
Now, six years after Obama's first announcement—the Cuban government’s arrest and imprisonment of the American aid worker (and alleged spy) Alan Gross in 2009 slowed things down—the relationship between the two Cold War adversaries is finally starting to thaw. Most Cubans welcome this development, but few want things to go back to how they were before the revolution, when Cuba was a de facto colony of Washington and Havana was a decadent playground for wealthy gringos.
Doing business with Americans presents Cuba with not only an opportunity but also a threat. To improve the lives of their people, Cuban officials are dabbling with capitalism across the economy, including the beef industry. In need of everything from new tractors to plow their fields to wind turbines to upgrade the island’s turn-of-the-century electrical grid, they have begun to bargain with businessmen such as Wright and Marvel. But they’re afraid of giving away too much in the process—especially to their neighbors up north. So as Cuba transforms and opens to free enterprise, the Communist Party is proceeding cautiously, trying to make sure nothing endangers its monopoly on power. As Fidel Castro explained in a 1966 speech, “Revolutions are not undertaken to leave things as they were.”
Soviet Sugar High
Cuba hasn’t always been a nation with empty shelves, and its beef shortage is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1958, one year before Castro ousted the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, there was nearly one cow for each of the island's approximately 6.5 million inhabitants. More than 50 years later, there are almost twice as many Cubans, but the country's herds are 30 percent smaller than they were in 1958, according to Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuban-born economist at the University of Pittsburgh.
Most Cubans point to the embargo to explain the state of the beef industry, and many economists agree that it's at least partly responsible. But some analysts say Cuba’s socialist system deserves a big part of the blame for the country’s economic misery. “You've got a central planner sitting in a high-rise Ministry of Agriculture building in Havana, trying to tell growers in the eastern provinces what to do with their pastures,” says William Messina, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida’s Food and Resource Economics Department. “What the hell does a person in Havana know? Maybe it's been a rainy summer. Maybe there's been a drought…. Pretty poor decisions get made.”
At the root of all Cuba's food woes is its greatest resource: sugar. The island had been almost entirely dependent on the crop since it was introduced hundreds of years ago, allegedly by Christopher Columbus. As Castro put it in a 1959 televised address, “One of our greatest causes of economic dependence on the United States is sugar, and it is imperative that we diversify our production and our markets.” Following the revolution, the Castro government announced plans to do just that, but two years later, Havana changed its tack; the Soviet Union offered to pay above-market prices for Cuban sugar in exchange for access to the island. Despite its earlier ideas about diversification, the Castro government again poured most of the nation's resources into sugar. By the 1980s, Cuba was the world's third-largest sugar producer, behind Brazil and India.
Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and took Cuba's economy with it. By that time, Cuba’s agricultural sector was heavily mechanized, and Moscow was the source of most of what was needed to sustain the industry—from fertilizers to new tractors. Lacking the infrastructure to grow much beyond sugar and unable to command the inflated prices it had enjoyed for 30 years, Cuba had no way to feed itself. This era of Cuban history—euphemistically called the Special Period—saw the average Cuban shed about 12 pounds, according to a 2013 paper published in the British Medical Journal. Cubans ate domestic cats, and peacocks and buffalo mysteriously vanished from the Havana zoo, according to The Economist.
With some of the best farmland and pastures in the Western Hemisphere, Cubans don't need to eat pets. “Cuba should increase its beef production, without any question,” says Pedro Sanchez, the Cuban-born director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at Columbia University. In four to five years, Cuba could be importing 40 percent of its food, instead of 80 percent. "We have to make a proper plan, but all the elements are there," he adds.
One of those elements arrived by private plane in Havana last year. Inside, supercooled with liquid nitrogen, was a gallon of Gator's goo.
Can You Make a Buck in Cuba?
Earlier this year, Wright invited me to El Macho to witness what’s become of Gator's seed. To reach the ranch, his chartered Chinese minibus passes through the Sierra del Chorrillo nature preserve, one of 48 protected areas managed by García's agency. The preserve is 10,000 acres of pristine wilderness where unshod ponies caper beneath a canopy of piñon pines and fossilized tree stumps jut from the earth.
As Wright steps off the minibus, he introduces me to Barbaro Casa López, the ranch’s foreman, an intense-looking man with a blue-black mustache and straw cowboy hat. Casa López is already putting Gator's semen to use, he says, and offers to show us. He leads Wright and me down a muddy lane between rows of enormous, empty pens. In one, about 20 bulls are corralled. These are Gator's offspring, Barbaro tells me. Wright claims they're the first cross between an American bull and Cuban heifers in more than 50 years. They're a year old and fattening up nicely, gaining nearly 2 pounds per day, Barbaro says. They'll keep gaining until they weigh about 1,400 pounds. Then they'll be sent to slaughter.
El Macho turns a small profit, but its earnings are limited because it can sell only to the state, and the state, not the market, dictates prices. In June, Barbaro says, the government increased the price for steers to 2,000 Cuban pesos a head—roughly $80. The result is that cowboys and ranch owners both earn less than bartenders and taxi drivers in Havana.