Your comment reminds me of how Marxist used to think they could do agriculture by just going to the library and looking things up. And I really think you’re deceiving yourself if you believe Russian and Cuba are going to feed the hungry in Syria.
Without foreign help, Assad's regime would already have collapsed. Civil wars often result in famine, due to all sides disrupting agriculture, for both sustenance and tactical advantage. Russian funding for Assad isn't some kind of aberration. For 50 years, Syria has been a Russian client state. The subsidies abated after the Cold War ended, but seem to have stepped up again, now that Putin appears to have chosen Syria as the place where Russia will make a stand, as regards the rollback of Russian influence.
I think it's unnecessary to resort to analogies involving unrelated fields to predict the outcome of this conflict. Take Libya, for instance. Gaddafi had a military headed up by incompetents who were defeated by a motley force of black African irregulars in Chad during the Toyota War. And yet the Libyan rebels were unable to defeat him without American intervention. Absent US military intervention, and assuming continued Russian (and other allied) funding, it's highly likely that Assad's regime will still be standing a year from now, and may even have driven the rebels out of the country.