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Green on red: Cuba and the Green Revolution
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Simon McGuinness
[One could quibble with the selective mis-quoting of Amnesty and the
usual 1-week tourist mis-perception stuff here but the fault may lie as
much with the Irish Times' historical editorial antagonism towards Cuba
as with the brevity of the writers visit, but the overall massage
communicates much about the Revolution and its deeply engrained green
credentials. Cuba is not the only country on the planet developing
sustainably by accident, or even because of the isolation imposed by the
US blockade - Cuba is green because it is revolutionary to be green.
Sooner or later the rest of us will wake up and smell the organic
coffee. -SMcG]
The Irish Times - May 26, 2007
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/magazine/2007/0526/1179498804326.html
Green on red
Cuba is forging a surprising future as the eco-capital of the Caribbean
, with booming organic urban agriculture, and dynamic environmental
education projects.
by Paddy Woodworth
Santa Clara, in central Cuba, is best known as the City of the Heroic
Guerrilla. Ernesto "Che" Guevara's remains rest here, in a moving little
memorial chamber, dwarfed by the stern concrete monument above it. This
small university town was the site of a decisive military victory in the
revolution which brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959, and it still
seems to regard him with warm affection. But Santa Clara is now
distinguished for another reason: it has become the fruit-and-vegetable
capital of the island, and, arguably, of the whole Caribbean.
Sometimes Che and the local products are part of the same stir-fry, and
that doesn't always make for a great mix. "Be more efficient every day.
Be better every day," the great revolutionary exhorts all who enter the
Tamarindo fruit-tree nursery from a freshly painted propaganda pillar.
The wicked glint in Che's eye in his iconic photographs suggests that he
must have been a fun guy to drink a mojito with; some of his quotations
suggest one would have had more craic with an earnest Victorian vicar.
Both sides of Che, however, would probably be delighted with the
extraordinary success of Cuba's organopónico revolution, in which Santa
Clara has led the way. The word, coined in Cuba, seems to derive from
hydroponics, the art of growing plants without soil, but is in fact
based on the richest hummus you could imagine. This remarkable market
garden movement has become a beacon to international advocates of urban
organic agriculture. Even Bill McKibben, author of the eco-doom
bestseller The End of Nature, has found some ground for optimism among
the flourishing carrots, guavas, avocados and radishes springing up in
former waste lots in every Cuban city, and town, in almost every
village. And for those who still look for flames in the embers of a
revolution dampened down by authoritarian dogma, the economic
distortions created by international tourism, and, above all, by the
crippling pressure of the US economic blockade, the organopónicos offer
echoes of the first fine rapture of the 1960s.
Cuba, beyond the tourist beaches and bars, often seems a run-down place,
where production is slow and slip-shod, where incentives to work hard
and innovate are lacking, where things simply do not work and a dull
resentment pervades the atmosphere, despite the charm and generosity of
many individual Cubans. Whether the resentment is primarily a response
against Castro's one-party state - Amnesty International describes
restrictions on human rights as "severe" - or against the misery
inflicted by the gringo blockade, is hard to gauge on a short visit. No
one shares their inner feelings too freely in a society which still
imprisons people for their opinions.
A DIFFERENT WORLD, WHERE EVERYTHING STILL SEEMS POSSIBLE
In any case, to visit Los Mineros organopónico in Santa Clara is to step
into a different and better world, like shifting step from a dull forced
march to a vibrant salsa.
Orlando Caballero Martínez and his wife María Luisa Jiménez run the
garden, which enjoys the status of referencia nacional - a model for the
nation - with infectious energy and evident pleasure. Orlando was a
soldier in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, and is proud of it. He
enjoys pointing out that the man now shaking the earth from a fat bunch
of radishes was a colonel in the same outfit. His wide-open grin and
arm-squeezing welcome recall the days when Che's guerrillas rode into
Santa Clara on horse-back to a generally rapturous reception, and
everything seemed possible.
A slogan on the improvised water tower behind Orlando warns that "to do
nothing, or to do less than one is able, is to be counter-revolutionary"
(Che, again). The soldier-turned-gardener does not fall into that
category.
Within two minutes he has us down on our knees, up close and personal
with a mass of earthworms, whose seething movements have created a new
kind of revolution. They are the humble architects of the wealth of
vegetables sprouting in the immaculate raised beds which make up most of
Los Mineros.
Worm-processed compost (lumbriculture) has been one of the keys to the
success of the organopónicos. The species selected - California reds is
their unlikely common name - turns waste matter into natural fertiliser
extraordinarily well and extraordinarily fast. The soil in the raised
beds is thus exceptionally rich.
Almost all pest control is also done by organic means. Orlando uses
marigolds as a deterrent. The Tamarindo fruit nursery uses a dwarf breed
of hen, which pecks away at nuisance insects with ruthless gusto.
Every organopónico seems to have its own special trick, whether using
old cosmetics bottles to protect labels from the elements, or an
ingenious system for keeping training lines taut for tomatoes, or even -
recorded by McKibben - pyramidal greenhouses to "focus energy".
Since the raised beds are so obviously productive, I wonder, why is
about a fifth of Los Mineros given over to level bed production?
Orlando's answer is shockingly simple: they cannot find enough scrap
bricks, or old railway sleepers, to make more beds. Later, I came across
a grim consequence of this shortage of the most basic goods in today's
Cuba. A small organopónico tended by schoolchildren to provide
nutritious meals had created raised beds using the only material to
hand: corrugated asbestos.
Up at street level at Los Mineros, María Luisa is selling the garden's
produce to a steady trickle of evidently satisfied customers from the
barrio. Her marriage to Orlando has lasted 40 years ("still going
strong", I am assured happily by both of them). Onions, spinach, Swiss
chard, tomatoes, radishes and herbs are set out on her small stall. They
come in robust sizes and mouth-watering colours, at variable prices to
which the state sets an upper limit. Orlando whispers to me that they
sell below their own prices to people who they know can't afford them.
The organopónicos were born out of necessity, in modern Cuba's hungriest
hour, when lucky people ate two meals a day and others subsisted on
sugar and water. The fall of the Soviet Union and its allies in the late
1980s deprived Havana of a generous market for its sugar and a source of
cheap imports, especially oil, as well as nitrate fertilisers. The
Clinton administration then tightened the screws on the US blockade, in
place since the early 1960s. This policy, much harsher than any boycott
ever imposed on apartheid South Africa, is regarded as illegal by
several international bodies, and also isolates Cuba from Washington's
Latin American trading partners. Cuba faced starvation and collapse in
this grim new era, euphemistically named the "Special Period in Time of
Peace".
Organic gardening on a massive scale proved a key factor in keeping the
Cubans on their feet. According to Bill McKibben, no fan of Castro's,
the country has "created what may be the world's largest model of
semi-sustainable agriculture, one that relies far less than the rest of
the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food
back and forth". Last year, Havana alone grew 300,000 tons of food,
"nearly its entire vegetable supply, and more than a token amount of
rice and meat". Rabbits, chickens, sheep, pigs, and even fish, can be
found in some urban market gardens.
The organopónicos pay their workers well, too, a crucial point in
maintaining their output as Cuba has again become more prosperous.
Opening the doors to mass tourism was the major element in Cuba's
current economic revival. This renewed (but very relative) prosperity,
however, has come at a high price in terms of twisting rewards for
labour right out of shape. A waiter or a taxi-driver can now easily earn
more in tips in a single day than a doctor can earn in a month. Only the
most dedicated professionals can resist that kind of temptation, and the
brain-drain towards the resorts is frightening.
As a worker at an organopónico, however, you can earn, with the help of
a generous profit-sharing scheme, twice as much as a middle-ranking
civil servant. The movement is also closely tied into Cuba's still
excellent educational and health services, which are Castro's greatest
achievements and the envy of most developing (and some developed)
countries. Each market garden is linked to a kindergarten, hospital, or
old people's home, and must supply fresh food directly at rock-bottom
prices before calculating its profits.
Most organopónicos are state-owned, but very small ones may be private.
Yvonne Otero Cruz has packed the patio of her substantial colonial-style
house in Santa Clara with exotic plants for interior decoration. She
also creates a marvellous variety of decorations from dried flowers in a
cramped attic. The very existence of any market for her products
underlines the fact that happier days have returned to the town. The
state has honoured her with recognition as a model producer at national
level, but strict restrictions on entrepreneurship mean that most of her
sales happen in her own handsome hallway. Her aged grandfather sits here
in a rocking chair, reading his Bible, happily oblivious to a visit from
local dignitaries, a foreign scientist and this reporter.
The Marianas organopónico is at the other extreme from Yvonne's patio,
employing 50 workers in small teams, each responsible for about 90 of
the centre's 532 raised beds, or for its extensive fruit plantations and
compost facility, whose produce is distributed to local farms. The
entire site had to be cleared, by machete, of marabú, a thorny alien
invasive plant from Africa which infests a disturbingly large proportion
of the island.
The director of Las Marianas, Mirella Reyes, walks me proudly through
yet another piece of waste ground converted to nutritious production. "I
think of these plants as good Cubans," she says, laughing as she
indicates a row of aubergines. "They saved us during the Special Period.
And I'll tell you something else: the Special Period made us all
vegetarians, for the first time."
Cubans still like their meat, of course, when they can get it, but they
enjoy a supply of cheap organic fruit-and-veg that many Westerners might
envy. There is an odd little mystery, though: the paladares, the private
houses permitted to set up small restaurants, buy avidly at the
organopónicos for their clients. But vegetables remain scarce and stingy
at the (mostly rather grotty) state-run tourist restaurants. In the
vegetable capital of Cuba, I ordered vegetables with my smoked pork at
the stately but sad 1878 eating house. I got only a spoonful of
yesterday's lettuce, shredded, shrivelled, and miserably undressed.
Leaving town by car the next day, I got a yearning for fresh tomatoes
and headed back to Los Mineros. María Luisa said they had just sold out,
but directed me to a private organopónico next door. I was greeted
warmly there, but the owner wanted to give away a bagful, rather than
accept payment in tourist (convertible) pesos, the only currency I was
carrying, which are worth roughly 25 times more than local pesos. He
eventually accepted, most reluctantly, the smallest coin I had.
Heading back up the street, I found myself pursued by Orlando, who had
spotted me from his radish bed. He could not let me leave Los Mineros
without a memento, he insisted, pressing a fat bunch of chard into my
hands, and one of his own hand-rolled cigars into my breast pocket.
A COMANDANTE WITH AN ECOLOGICAL AGENDA
Organic gardening is by no means Cuba's only claim to being the green
jewel in the crown of the Caribbean. On most other islands environmental
degradation is rampant and increasing. Even the Washington-published
Smithsonian magazine recognises that Castro presides over the most
conservation-conscious island in the region. This is, of course, partly
due to the Special Period, which deprived the country of chemical
fertilisers and pesticides. But Castro's inner circle had always
included one man with an environmental agenda, Comandante Guillermo
Garcia Frías, once an illiterate peasant who saved Castro's and
Guevara's lives in the early days of the Revolution. Later appointed to
the Central Committee, he argued for higher conservation standards than
were typical of Marxist-Leninist economies. As a result, the country
boasts some fine national parks and protected areas. Many of its
precious endemic species - those which exist nowhere else in the world -
have surprisingly healthy populations. The tiny Cuban Tody, for example,
a noisy bird the size and shape of a green, red, grey and violet
golfball, can be heard and seen close-up in woods across the length and
breadth of the island.
The Comandante was, briefly, a surprise guest at the second
Iberian-Latin-American Symposium on Ecological Restoration, which took
place in Santa Clara last month. His presence was not only a rare
honour, it was also an indication that Cuba is ready to make a
significant move forward. Ecological restoration is a paradigm shift
from simply conserving what remains of its wilderness areas toward the
trickier but ultimately very rewarding prospect of rebuilding ecosystems
which have suffered severe damage or degradation.
Jesús Matos Mederos, who co-founded the Cuban Group of Ecological
Restoration in 2002, believes that Cuba has made great efforts to
develop restoration in a short period, despite the chronic lack of
resources for an enterprise that requires generous investments of money
and time.
The conference heard fascinating stories from other lands:
how Colombian ecologists are restoring plants attractive to bees in
areas devastated by coca and coffee monocultures - and disputed by the
army and FARC guerrillas - so that local peasants can produce and export
honey instead of cocaine;
how a movement for the "restoration of natural capital" is finding
common ground between ecology and economics;
a message from the few remaining Lacondona Maya people about restoring
subtropical forests while rotating sweetcorn cultivation;
how to rebuild the Delaware estuary for nature, recreation and
industry;
how thousands of hectares of fire-prone forestry plantations in
Andalusia are being returned to the kind of productive savannah
landscape a medieval cattle farmer would have recognised.
HOW A RARE CACTUS CHANGED A COMMUNITY
But one of the most remarkable stories at the conference came from much
closer to Santa Clara, though it does not - yet - concern restoration,
properly speaking. Twenty kilometres from the town, on a vertiginous
slope prone to landslips, a cactus unique to the area clings to
continued existence in the wild only by a handful of tenacious roots. A
few years ago, only three specimens of Melocactus actinacanthus were
known to survive here. Since its identification in 1976, collectors for
the illegal international trade in exotic plants have steadily
undermined an always tiny population. Someone somewhere in Ireland quite
possibly has one as a centre-piece on their dining table. But before
guilt seizes you by the throat, remember that there are many similar
varieties of Melocactus, generally globular, green and very spiky. Some,
as in the case of actinacanthus, have a velvety looking reddish bonnet
on top.
Collectors are not the only threat to the cacti. Matos and his
colleagues rejoiced recently when they found a further colony of 14
plants, near the carefully guarded threesome. Just months later, a
landslip swept away more than half the second colony, and the world
population plummeted towards extinction again. At present, the Cubans
are experimenting with growing the cactus from seed, with great
difficulty, but hope to begin restoring individuals from botanical
gardens to their original home in the next few years.
Nigel Taylor at Kew gardens in London, who is assisting the project,
argues that actinacanthus is not a species in its own right, but a large
version of another rare Cuban endemic, the dwarf Turk's Cap cactus,
Melocactus matanzanus. Matos contests this, but both agree that
actinacanthus is worthy of urgent conservation measures. Unsurprisingly,
none of the subsistence farmers in the nearby isolated settlement of
Revacadero had even heard of the cactus. They had more pressing
concerns, such as survival. But Jesús Matos, a man whose quiet manner
hides massive determination, saw an opportunity to use the cactus as the
spearhead of an environmental education campaign in the area, officially
a protected zone since 1980. This campaign might not only save the plant
but also halt chronic erosion, extirpate alien invaders such as marabú,
and perhaps even achieve reforestation with native vegetation.
Matos needed a local ally and he found a gem in Arlén Izquierdo, a woman
with long dark hair, strikingly clear blue eyes, and an irrepressible
belief that, in Castro's ubiquitous slogan, "a better world is
possible", though I never heard her quote it. Che Guevara used to dream
about building true communism in Cuba with "the New Man", free of
selfish impulses and dedicated to his fellow human beings. After meeting
Arlén, you feel he should have started with the women.
She was the local teacher and doubled as the village hairdresser. She
knows everyone, and everyone knows her. Though her enthusiasm had
already her earned the nickname of la loca [the mad one], this was a
kind of compliment in a village where, as one resident told me,
"everything was dead here until Arlén started the cactus campaign". She
eagerly accepted Matos's offer of a new job which stretched her in many
ways. Her point of departure was the children. She started a "Save the
Melocactus" campaign in local schools. Today, the first thing you notice
on arrival is that almost every fence is hung with a little cardboard
placard, colourfully telling residents that "the forests are refuges for
animals", or that "Trees = Life".
Her weekly meetings with the children became immensely popular. "They
are always combined with games," she says, "or with excursions to the
river near where the cactus grows, with bathing." None of the children
had ever before thought of their environment as anything other than a
source of food. They began to see the countryside outside their doors as
magical, but endangered by overgrazing, uncontrolled burning, and
invasive alien species. They have now produced no less than seven little
plays, scripted by Arlén. The plots show great pride that their village
has something unique to protect, such as the cactus. But they also show
a bigger picture, as when a nurse comes on stage, carrying a sick
patient - our entire planet.
The adults in Revacadero began to get the message. It is hard not to,
when the only chemist's shop and only grocery store in the area are
festooned with the children's exuberant paintings and posters.
Interestingly, much of the medicine in the chemist's is herbal. The
Special Period sparked a massive revival in folk remedies. There are, of
course, the usual Cuban contradictions - the paint the children use, for
example, has a very high mercury content, because nothing else is
available or affordable.
Now Arlén has every age group in the area involved, including
pensioners. She insists that there is no political or religious
exclusion at her meetings. "I knew one woman who didn't attend was a
Jehovah's Witness. I asked her if she believed that nature was God's
creation. She said she did, so I asked her to help protect it, and she
is now one of our foremost supporters." Another elderly woman creates
delightful ornaments from local dried flowers - clearly a growth area in
Cuba. The little nursery in Arlén's improvised greenhouse, originally
intended only to germinate the cactus from seed, now produces everything
from avocado to lemon seedlings for the entire community.
The adult meetings discuss practical issues, from minimising erosion
(plough across a hillside, not up and down it) to controlling the use of
fire. But again, entertainment content is paramount. "I'm happy if there
is five minutes' debate for every 20 minutes' dancing," she says
blithely.
There is no more typically Cuban solution to Cuban problems than to
start up the music. She searches the national and UN calendar for
reasons to party - International Wetlands Day (February 2nd) and the Day
of Cuban Science (January 15th) are now celebrated in a village which
had very little to celebrate before. Environmental education has become
entwined with a revival of community life in general.
Word spread rapidly of the programme's success. But when Arlén received
a summons to meet a senior figure in the local administration, she
ignored it, half fearing she had committed some infraction. A police
escort followed up the message, and she learned she was to take her
campaign to neighbouring settlements in the 7,000 hectare Santa Clara
Savannah Protected Area. To reach some of them, she had to learn to ride
a horse. To a woman who, with her husband Ernesto, built her own house,
produces her own mango, papaya, pineapple and banana, makes her own
popcorn, butter and cheese, and salt pork from her own pigs, this was
all in a day's work.
After watching a special performance from the children, Arlén, Ernesto,
Jesús Matos and Alberto Torres, curator of the Santa Clara Herbarium,
lead me into the broiling midday sun and up the hills above the river.
No one else is moving, but Cuban Todys repeatedly serenade our passing.
A metre-long green and blue lizard surveys us from a nearby tree. Turkey
vultures patrol every ridge, the brilliant light transforming their
usually black plumage to rich chocolate brown.
We finally reach a path where we walk level with the vultures' elegantly
extended wingtips. The spiky vegetation demands a change to long-sleeved
shirts despite the blistering heat. We are close to the slope where the
remaining wild specimens of Melocactus actinacanthus have been found.
The small but catastrophic landslip which buried half the last colony is
visible.
Suddenly, Alberto pauses, staring at a mass of thorny undergrowth right
on the path. The midday sun has caught a faint red glow beneath the
dense brown vegetation. He lifts the thorns gingerly. It is a small but
perfectly formed Melocactus actinacanthus. The known population of the
cactus in the wild has just abruptly increased by about 10 per cent. The
other cacti, carefully labelled, are scattered on the hard-to-access
slope below us. So close to human footfall, the survival of the newly
found plant is clearly even more tenuous than usual. But its
serendipitous discovery crowns a day in which pessimism, for once, seems
utterly out of place.
Paddy Woodworth's new travel book, The Basque Country, will be published
by Signal and Oxford in September
© 2007 The Irish Times
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Green on red: Cuba and the Green Revolution
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Simon McGuinness
[One could quibble with the selective mis-quoting of Amnesty and the
usual 1-week tourist mis-perception stuff here but the fault may lie as
much with the Irish Times' historical editorial antagonism towards Cuba
as with the brevity of the writers visit, but the overall massage
communicates much about the Revolution and its deeply engrained green
credentials. Cuba is not the only country on the planet developing
sustainably by accident, or even because of the isolation imposed by the
US blockade - Cuba is green because it is revolutionary to be green.
Sooner or later the rest of us will wake up and smell the organic
coffee. -SMcG]
The Irish Times - May 26, 2007
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/magazine/2007/0526/1179498804326.html
Green on red
Cuba is forging a surprising future as the eco-capital of the Caribbean
, with booming organic urban agriculture, and dynamic environmental
education projects.
by Paddy Woodworth
Santa Clara, in central Cuba, is best known as the City of the Heroic
Guerrilla. Ernesto "Che" Guevara's remains rest here, in a moving little
memorial chamber, dwarfed by the stern concrete monument above it. This
small university town was the site of a decisive military victory in the
revolution which brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959, and it still
seems to regard him with warm affection. But Santa Clara is now
distinguished for another reason: it has become the fruit-and-vegetable
capital of the island, and, arguably, of the whole Caribbean.
Sometimes Che and the local products are part of the same stir-fry, and
that doesn't always make for a great mix. "Be more efficient every day.
Be better every day," the great revolutionary exhorts all who enter the
Tamarindo fruit-tree nursery from a freshly painted propaganda pillar.
The wicked glint in Che's eye in his iconic photographs suggests that he
must have been a fun guy to drink a mojito with; some of his quotations
suggest one would have had more craic with an earnest Victorian vicar.
Both sides of Che, however, would probably be delighted with the
extraordinary success of Cuba's organopónico revolution, in which Santa
Clara has led the way. The word, coined in Cuba, seems to derive from
hydroponics, the art of growing plants without soil, but is in fact
based on the richest hummus you could imagine. This remarkable market
garden movement has become a beacon to international advocates of urban
organic agriculture. Even Bill McKibben, author of the eco-doom
bestseller The End of Nature, has found some ground for optimism among
the flourishing carrots, guavas, avocados and radishes springing up in
former waste lots in every Cuban city, and town, in almost every
village. And for those who still look for flames in the embers of a
revolution dampened down by authoritarian dogma, the economic
distortions created by international tourism, and, above all, by the
crippling pressure of the US economic blockade, the organopónicos offer
echoes of the first fine rapture of the 1960s.
Cuba, beyond the tourist beaches and bars, often seems a run-down place,
where production is slow and slip-shod, where incentives to work hard
and innovate are lacking, where things simply do not work and a dull
resentment pervades the atmosphere, despite the charm and generosity of
many individual Cubans. Whether the resentment is primarily a response
against Castro's one-party state - Amnesty International describes
restrictions on human rights as "severe" - or against the misery
inflicted by the gringo blockade, is hard to gauge on a short visit. No
one shares their inner feelings too freely in a society which still
imprisons people for their opinions.
A DIFFERENT WORLD, WHERE EVERYTHING STILL SEEMS POSSIBLE
In any case, to visit Los Mineros organopónico in Santa Clara is to step
into a different and better world, like shifting step from a dull forced
march to a vibrant salsa.
Orlando Caballero Martínez and his wife María Luisa Jiménez run the
garden, which enjoys the status of referencia nacional - a model for the
nation - with infectious energy and evident pleasure. Orlando was a
soldier in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, and is proud of it. He
enjoys pointing out that the man now shaking the earth from a fat bunch
of radishes was a colonel in the same outfit. His wide-open grin and
arm-squeezing welcome recall the days when Che's guerrillas rode into
Santa Clara on horse-back to a generally rapturous reception, and
everything seemed possible.
A slogan on the improvised water tower behind Orlando warns that "to do
nothing, or to do less than one is able, is to be counter-revolutionary"
(Che, again). The soldier-turned-gardener does not fall into that
category.
Within two minutes he has us down on our knees, up close and personal
with a mass of earthworms, whose seething movements have created a new
kind of revolution. They are the humble architects of the wealth of
vegetables sprouting in the immaculate raised beds which make up most of
Los Mineros.
Worm-processed compost (lumbriculture) has been one of the keys to the
success of the organopónicos. The species selected - California reds is
their unlikely common name - turns waste matter into natural fertiliser
extraordinarily well and extraordinarily fast. The soil in the raised
beds is thus exceptionally rich.
Almost all pest control is also done by organic means. Orlando uses
marigolds as a deterrent. The Tamarindo fruit nursery uses a dwarf breed
of hen, which pecks away at nuisance insects with ruthless gusto.
Every organopónico seems to have its own special trick, whether using
old cosmetics bottles to protect labels from the elements, or an
ingenious system for keeping training lines taut for tomatoes, or even -
recorded by McKibben - pyramidal greenhouses to "focus energy".
Since the raised beds are so obviously productive, I wonder, why is
about a fifth of Los Mineros given over to level bed production?
Orlando's answer is shockingly simple: they cannot find enough scrap
bricks, or old railway sleepers, to make more beds. Later, I came across
a grim consequence of this shortage of the most basic goods in today's
Cuba. A small organopónico tended by schoolchildren to provide
nutritious meals had created raised beds using the only material to
hand: corrugated asbestos.
Up at street level at Los Mineros, María Luisa is selling the garden's
produce to a steady trickle of evidently satisfied customers from the
barrio. Her marriage to Orlando has lasted 40 years ("still going
strong", I am assured happily by both of them). Onions, spinach, Swiss
chard, tomatoes, radishes and herbs are set out on her small stall. They
come in robust sizes and mouth-watering colours, at variable prices to
which the state sets an upper limit. Orlando whispers to me that they
sell below their own prices to people who they know can't afford them.
The organopónicos were born out of necessity, in modern Cuba's hungriest
hour, when lucky people ate two meals a day and others subsisted on
sugar and water. The fall of the Soviet Union and its allies in the late
1980s deprived Havana of a generous market for its sugar and a source of
cheap imports, especially oil, as well as nitrate fertilisers. The
Clinton administration then tightened the screws on the US blockade, in
place since the early 1960s. This policy, much harsher than any boycott
ever imposed on apartheid South Africa, is regarded as illegal by
several international bodies, and also isolates Cuba from Washington's
Latin American trading partners. Cuba faced starvation and collapse in
this grim new era, euphemistically named the "Special Period in Time of
Peace".
Organic gardening on a massive scale proved a key factor in keeping the
Cubans on their feet. According to Bill McKibben, no fan of Castro's,
the country has "created what may be the world's largest model of
semi-sustainable agriculture, one that relies far less than the rest of
the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food
back and forth". Last year, Havana alone grew 300,000 tons of food,
"nearly its entire vegetable supply, and more than a token amount of
rice and meat". Rabbits, chickens, sheep, pigs, and even fish, can be
found in some urban market gardens.
The organopónicos pay their workers well, too, a crucial point in
maintaining their output as Cuba has again become more prosperous.
Opening the doors to mass tourism was the major element in Cuba's
current economic revival. This renewed (but very relative) prosperity,
however, has come at a high price in terms of twisting rewards for
labour right out of shape. A waiter or a taxi-driver can now easily earn
more in tips in a single day than a doctor can earn in a month. Only the
most dedicated professionals can resist that kind of temptation, and the
brain-drain towards the resorts is frightening.
As a worker at an organopónico, however, you can earn, with the help of
a generous profit-sharing scheme, twice as much as a middle-ranking
civil servant. The movement is also closely tied into Cuba's still
excellent educational and health services, which are Castro's greatest
achievements and the envy of most developing (and some developed)
countries. Each market garden is linked to a kindergarten, hospital, or
old people's home, and must supply fresh food directly at rock-bottom
prices before calculating its profits.
Most organopónicos are state-owned, but very small ones may be private.
Yvonne Otero Cruz has packed the patio of her substantial colonial-style
house in Santa Clara with exotic plants for interior decoration. She
also creates a marvellous variety of decorations from dried flowers in a
cramped attic. The very existence of any market for her products
underlines the fact that happier days have returned to the town. The
state has honoured her with recognition as a model producer at national
level, but strict restrictions on entrepreneurship mean that most of her
sales happen in her own handsome hallway. Her aged grandfather sits here
in a rocking chair, reading his Bible, happily oblivious to a visit from
local dignitaries, a foreign scientist and this reporter.
The Marianas organopónico is at the other extreme from Yvonne's patio,
employing 50 workers in small teams, each responsible for about 90 of
the centre's 532 raised beds, or for its extensive fruit plantations and
compost facility, whose produce is distributed to local farms. The
entire site had to be cleared, by machete, of marabú, a thorny alien
invasive plant from Africa which infests a disturbingly large proportion
of the island.
The director of Las Marianas, Mirella Reyes, walks me proudly through
yet another piece of waste ground converted to nutritious production. "I
think of these plants as good Cubans," she says, laughing as she
indicates a row of aubergines. "They saved us during the Special Period.
And I'll tell you something else: the Special Period made us all
vegetarians, for the first time."
Cubans still like their meat, of course, when they can get it, but they
enjoy a supply of cheap organic fruit-and-veg that many Westerners might
envy. There is an odd little mystery, though: the paladares, the private
houses permitted to set up small restaurants, buy avidly at the
organopónicos for their clients. But vegetables remain scarce and stingy
at the (mostly rather grotty) state-run tourist restaurants. In the
vegetable capital of Cuba, I ordered vegetables with my smoked pork at
the stately but sad 1878 eating house. I got only a spoonful of
yesterday's lettuce, shredded, shrivelled, and miserably undressed.
Leaving town by car the next day, I got a yearning for fresh tomatoes
and headed back to Los Mineros. María Luisa said they had just sold out,
but directed me to a private organopónico next door. I was greeted
warmly there, but the owner wanted to give away a bagful, rather than
accept payment in tourist (convertible) pesos, the only currency I was
carrying, which are worth roughly 25 times more than local pesos. He
eventually accepted, most reluctantly, the smallest coin I had.
Heading back up the street, I found myself pursued by Orlando, who had
spotted me from his radish bed. He could not let me leave Los Mineros
without a memento, he insisted, pressing a fat bunch of chard into my
hands, and one of his own hand-rolled cigars into my breast pocket.
A COMANDANTE WITH AN ECOLOGICAL AGENDA
Organic gardening is by no means Cuba's only claim to being the green
jewel in the crown of the Caribbean. On most other islands environmental
degradation is rampant and increasing. Even the Washington-published
Smithsonian magazine recognises that Castro presides over the most
conservation-conscious island in the region. This is, of course, partly
due to the Special Period, which deprived the country of chemical
fertilisers and pesticides. But Castro's inner circle had always
included one man with an environmental agenda, Comandante Guillermo
Garcia Frías, once an illiterate peasant who saved Castro's and
Guevara's lives in the early days of the Revolution. Later appointed to
the Central Committee, he argued for higher conservation standards than
were typical of Marxist-Leninist economies. As a result, the country
boasts some fine national parks and protected areas. Many of its
precious endemic species - those which exist nowhere else in the world -
have surprisingly healthy populations. The tiny Cuban Tody, for example,
a noisy bird the size and shape of a green, red, grey and violet
golfball, can be heard and seen close-up in woods across the length and
breadth of the island.
The Comandante was, briefly, a surprise guest at the second
Iberian-Latin-American Symposium on Ecological Restoration, which took
place in Santa Clara last month. His presence was not only a rare
honour, it was also an indication that Cuba is ready to make a
significant move forward. Ecological restoration is a paradigm shift
from simply conserving what remains of its wilderness areas toward the
trickier but ultimately very rewarding prospect of rebuilding ecosystems
which have suffered severe damage or degradation.
Jesús Matos Mederos, who co-founded the Cuban Group of Ecological
Restoration in 2002, believes that Cuba has made great efforts to
develop restoration in a short period, despite the chronic lack of
resources for an enterprise that requires generous investments of money
and time.
The conference heard fascinating stories from other lands:
how Colombian ecologists are restoring plants attractive to bees in
areas devastated by coca and coffee monocultures - and disputed by the
army and FARC guerrillas - so that local peasants can produce and export
honey instead of cocaine;
how a movement for the "restoration of natural capital" is finding
common ground between ecology and economics;
a message from the few remaining Lacondona Maya people about restoring
subtropical forests while rotating sweetcorn cultivation;
how to rebuild the Delaware estuary for nature, recreation and
industry;
how thousands of hectares of fire-prone forestry plantations in
Andalusia are being returned to the kind of productive savannah
landscape a medieval cattle farmer would have recognised.
HOW A RARE CACTUS CHANGED A COMMUNITY
But one of the most remarkable stories at the conference came from much
closer to Santa Clara, though it does not - yet - concern restoration,
properly speaking. Twenty kilometres from the town, on a vertiginous
slope prone to landslips, a cactus unique to the area clings to
continued existence in the wild only by a handful of tenacious roots. A
few years ago, only three specimens of Melocactus actinacanthus were
known to survive here. Since its identification in 1976, collectors for
the illegal international trade in exotic plants have steadily
undermined an always tiny population. Someone somewhere in Ireland quite
possibly has one as a centre-piece on their dining table. But before
guilt seizes you by the throat, remember that there are many similar
varieties of Melocactus, generally globular, green and very spiky. Some,
as in the case of actinacanthus, have a velvety looking reddish bonnet
on top.
Collectors are not the only threat to the cacti. Matos and his
colleagues rejoiced recently when they found a further colony of 14
plants, near the carefully guarded threesome. Just months later, a
landslip swept away more than half the second colony, and the world
population plummeted towards extinction again. At present, the Cubans
are experimenting with growing the cactus from seed, with great
difficulty, but hope to begin restoring individuals from botanical
gardens to their original home in the next few years.
Nigel Taylor at Kew gardens in London, who is assisting the project,
argues that actinacanthus is not a species in its own right, but a large
version of another rare Cuban endemic, the dwarf Turk's Cap cactus,
Melocactus matanzanus. Matos contests this, but both agree that
actinacanthus is worthy of urgent conservation measures. Unsurprisingly,
none of the subsistence farmers in the nearby isolated settlement of
Revacadero had even heard of the cactus. They had more pressing
concerns, such as survival. But Jesús Matos, a man whose quiet manner
hides massive determination, saw an opportunity to use the cactus as the
spearhead of an environmental education campaign in the area, officially
a protected zone since 1980. This campaign might not only save the plant
but also halt chronic erosion, extirpate alien invaders such as marabú,
and perhaps even achieve reforestation with native vegetation.
Matos needed a local ally and he found a gem in Arlén Izquierdo, a woman
with long dark hair, strikingly clear blue eyes, and an irrepressible
belief that, in Castro's ubiquitous slogan, "a better world is
possible", though I never heard her quote it. Che Guevara used to dream
about building true communism in Cuba with "the New Man", free of
selfish impulses and dedicated to his fellow human beings. After meeting
Arlén, you feel he should have started with the women.
She was the local teacher and doubled as the village hairdresser. She
knows everyone, and everyone knows her. Though her enthusiasm had
already her earned the nickname of la loca [the mad one], this was a
kind of compliment in a village where, as one resident told me,
"everything was dead here until Arlén started the cactus campaign". She
eagerly accepted Matos's offer of a new job which stretched her in many
ways. Her point of departure was the children. She started a "Save the
Melocactus" campaign in local schools. Today, the first thing you notice
on arrival is that almost every fence is hung with a little cardboard
placard, colourfully telling residents that "the forests are refuges for
animals", or that "Trees = Life".
Her weekly meetings with the children became immensely popular. "They
are always combined with games," she says, "or with excursions to the
river near where the cactus grows, with bathing." None of the children
had ever before thought of their environment as anything other than a
source of food. They began to see the countryside outside their doors as
magical, but endangered by overgrazing, uncontrolled burning, and
invasive alien species. They have now produced no less than seven little
plays, scripted by Arlén. The plots show great pride that their village
has something unique to protect, such as the cactus. But they also show
a bigger picture, as when a nurse comes on stage, carrying a sick
patient - our entire planet.
The adults in Revacadero began to get the message. It is hard not to,
when the only chemist's shop and only grocery store in the area are
festooned with the children's exuberant paintings and posters.
Interestingly, much of the medicine in the chemist's is herbal. The
Special Period sparked a massive revival in folk remedies. There are, of
course, the usual Cuban contradictions - the paint the children use, for
example, has a very high mercury content, because nothing else is
available or affordable.
Now Arlén has every age group in the area involved, including
pensioners. She insists that there is no political or religious
exclusion at her meetings. "I knew one woman who didn't attend was a
Jehovah's Witness. I asked her if she believed that nature was God's
creation. She said she did, so I asked her to help protect it, and she
is now one of our foremost supporters." Another elderly woman creates
delightful ornaments from local dried flowers - clearly a growth area in
Cuba. The little nursery in Arlén's improvised greenhouse, originally
intended only to germinate the cactus from seed, now produces everything
from avocado to lemon seedlings for the entire community.
The adult meetings discuss practical issues, from minimising erosion
(plough across a hillside, not up and down it) to controlling the use of
fire. But again, entertainment content is paramount. "I'm happy if there
is five minutes' debate for every 20 minutes' dancing," she says
blithely.
There is no more typically Cuban solution to Cuban problems than to
start up the music. She searches the national and UN calendar for
reasons to party - International Wetlands Day (February 2nd) and the Day
of Cuban Science (January 15th) are now celebrated in a village which
had very little to celebrate before. Environmental education has become
entwined with a revival of community life in general.
Word spread rapidly of the programme's success. But when Arlén received
a summons to meet a senior figure in the local administration, she
ignored it, half fearing she had committed some infraction. A police
escort followed up the message, and she learned she was to take her
campaign to neighbouring settlements in the 7,000 hectare Santa Clara
Savannah Protected Area. To reach some of them, she had to learn to ride
a horse. To a woman who, with her husband Ernesto, built her own house,
produces her own mango, papaya, pineapple and banana, makes her own
popcorn, butter and cheese, and salt pork from her own pigs, this was
all in a day's work.
After watching a special performance from the children, Arlén, Ernesto,
Jesús Matos and Alberto Torres, curator of the Santa Clara Herbarium,
lead me into the broiling midday sun and up the hills above the river.
No one else is moving, but Cuban Todys repeatedly serenade our passing.
A metre-long green and blue lizard surveys us from a nearby tree. Turkey
vultures patrol every ridge, the brilliant light transforming their
usually black plumage to rich chocolate brown.
We finally reach a path where we walk level with the vultures' elegantly
extended wingtips. The spiky vegetation demands a change to long-sleeved
shirts despite the blistering heat. We are close to the slope where the
remaining wild specimens of Melocactus actinacanthus have been found.
The small but catastrophic landslip which buried half the last colony is
visible.
Suddenly, Alberto pauses, staring at a mass of thorny undergrowth right
on the path. The midday sun has caught a faint red glow beneath the
dense brown vegetation. He lifts the thorns gingerly. It is a small but
perfectly formed Melocactus actinacanthus. The known population of the
cactus in the wild has just abruptly increased by about 10 per cent. The
other cacti, carefully labelled, are scattered on the hard-to-access
slope below us. So close to human footfall, the survival of the newly
found plant is clearly even more tenuous than usual. But its
serendipitous discovery crowns a day in which pessimism, for once, seems
utterly out of place.
Paddy Woodworth's new travel book, The Basque Country, will be published
by Signal and Oxford in September
© 2007 The Irish Times
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