Cuba Usufruct has been revived as part of the agricultural change associated with Cuba's Special Period. As a legacy of sanctions and a struggling economy, Cuba had accumulated many crumbling buildings that could not be repaired. These were torn down and the empty lots lay idle for years until the food shortages forced Cuban citizens to make use of every piece of land. Initially, this was an ad-hoc process where ordinary Cubans took the initiative to grow their own food in whatever piece of land was available. Tenure but not ownership was formalised with a legal framework using usufruct to give farmers rights on a profit-sharing basis to the products produced from the land, but not ownership rights to the land itself. Social Ecology Usufruct is a central concept in social ecology. Murray Bookchin defines usufruct informally as The freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by virtue of the fact that they are using them Bookchin contrasts Usufruct with other property relations, saying: Usufruct, in short, differs qualitatively from the quid pro quo of reciprocity, exchange, and mutual aid — all of which are trapped within history's demeaning account books with their "just" ratios and their "honest" balance sheets. He pairs the concept of usufruct with complementarity and the irreducible minimum as core to his ethical world view. What "civilization" has given us, in spite of itself, is the recognition that the ancient values of usufruct, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum must be extended from the kin group to humanity as a whole. See also Cestui que Classical liberalism Common ownership Dominium Dower Easement Fee simple Four Fs (legal) Freedom to roam Freehold (law) Geolibertarianism Georgism Leasehold Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians Mutualism (economic theory) Perpetual usufruct Profit (real property) Right-of-way (railroad) Rights of way in England and Wales Squatting Trover References Property law Civil law (legal system) Civil law legal terminology Property law legal terminology