Sowing Change: The Making of Havana's Urban Agriculture

5. State Land, Green Agendas, Old Ideas, and Community Work

88 5 State Land, Green Agendas, Old Ideas, and Community Work In September 2001, as part of a sustainable agriculture course offered by the FANJNH, I joined a group of Cubans on a tour of city gardens. The tour was meant to provide participants with inspiration for a final course assignment: the design of a permaculture-inspired garden that, following the teachings of Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, would create a closed production system that would mimic “nature” in form and function. Among the gardens we visited, there was one I had seen months earlier as I accompanied a Cuba solidarity brigade from England interested in learning from and volunteering with Havana’s urban farmers under the guidance of the FANJNH. This garden was located on state land in an outlying district in the touristic municipality of Habana Vieja. With its neat rows of rectangular cultivation beds of one crop each, it hardly met the permaculture standards of intercropping and curvilinear design.1 What the site lacked in design appeal, however, it made up for in suitability for large-group visits . Measuring about twenty-five by eleven meters in size, it was roomy enough to allow many people to be on site at the same time. Moreover, the garden excelled in terms of hospitality. Its caretaker was an affable septuagenarian named Jorge whose home terrace, one level up at the back of the garden, could comfortably hold about twenty people for a feast that Jorge’s wife, María, willingly prepared for a reasonable fee. Given all of this, it was no surprise that the garden was a favorite stop for the FANJNH tours. 89 State Land, Green Agendas, Old Ideas, and Community Work Over the years, I got to know Jorge and María independently of the foundation. I visited them often and even lived with them for a short time. One afternoon, as we sat on their home terrace, Jorge talked about his aspirations for the garden. He told me about how, after taking his first permaculture design course with the FANJNH, he had started thinking about how to make the garden more sustainable and aesthetically pleasing. As he spoke about this, María, ran into the house and brought back the design he and a colleague had drawn up after completing the FANJNH course (see Figure 5.1). When I commented on how little this design resembled the current appearance of the garden, Jorge explained that he could not single-handedly bring this new plan to fruition with his meager material resources. “That little piece of land is my dream,” he said. “I would love for people walking by to stop and say, ‘Look how beautiful that garden looks,’ but I lack the resources. I only earn ninety-four pesos and I cannot take from my salary to buy things for the garden.” Figure 5.1. Planned permaculture design for Jorge’s parcela (terrace to the right). 90 Sowing Change Things like hoses, a water pump, and other materials needed to build a planned fish pond and a staircase that would connect the terrace of his home with the garden below were expensive.The ladder alone would cost fifteen hundred pesos, an impossible proposition for a man whose retirement salary was under one hundred pesos a month. As María explained, Jorge could not even afford to buy the variety of fruit trees and medicinal herbs that would move the garden closer to the biodiversity ideal promoted by the FANJNH. The foundation had provided Jorge with some necessary agricultural inputs (e.g., it had arranged for the delivery of a couple truckloads of topsoil), but this assistance was insufficient. To complicate things further, Jorge’s parcela had recently come under threat of “eviction,” and he now felt that improving the site was pointless , unless he could ensure the government’s continued support. In the early 1990s, a government representative had granted authorization (though not in writing) for the cultivation of the site, but things had changed since that time: the economy was doing much better, vegetables were more readily accessible to the population at large, and major state investment in construction was once again possible, especially in touristic districts like Habana Vieja. These changes made it difficult to defend the continued permanence of parcelas like Jorge’s that had come into existence at a time when the state had few resources for urban development...