Sowing Change: The Making of Havana's Urban Agriculture

7. Global Networks and Cuban Urban Agriculture

133 7 Global Networks and Cuban Urban Agriculture In November 2008, the FANJNH organized the Third Latin American Permaculture Convention at a camping resort a distance from Havana. In attendance were over forty permaculture enthusiasts from countries like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, Spain, and the United States. Also present at the convention were ninety-four Cubans, including fifty small-scale urban farmers from various parts of the country and employees from the FANJNH, government institutions like the MINAG, and Cuban NGOs like ACPA, CIERIC, and the Cuban Council of Churches. The producers from Havana represented different barrios, as well as diverse trajectories within the city’s urban agriculture movement. There were individuals like Manuel and the dynamic duo, Vilda and Pepe, who, from their respective municipalities of Playa and Marianao, had led community-centered projects (i.e., horticulturalist clubs, agricultural consultancy offices, and food conservation workshops) that greatly impacted the early development of the field. While less influential, also in attendance were a number of parceleros that had been around since the early years of the Special Period. Among them were Pancho, a man of peasant background with a large parcela and a fish breeding pond near the capitol building in Centro Habana and Vivencio, a retired army man with a commercial medicinal plant garden in the central municipality of Plaza. There were also, importantly for the FANJNH, many producers who self-identified as permaculturists. Some were relative novices in the field like Miriam, an agronomist who had recently started coordi- 134 Sowing Change nating a group of women in Diez de Octubre who wanted to commercialize ornamental plants grown in their permaculture-inspired patios, and Claudio, a retired member of the Cuban mercantile fleet, who had just started experimenting with rabbits, beekeeping, and tilapia on his patio in Habana del Este with the aim of supplementing his family’s diet. Finally, there were a number of producers who had been widely recognized for their novel applications of permaculture design like Rafael, with his still-thriving, noncommercial patio in El Cerro, and Manolo, whose rooftop animal production in the same municipality had earned him not just fame but money. While I was interested in what all of them had to say to an international audience, I was most curious to hear Manolo’s presentation, since I knew him to be a good storyteller and thought he had one of the most interesting permaculture experiments in Havana. With the assistance of the FANJNH and ACPA, Manolo had repurposed the rooftop of his home to raise rabbits, guinea pigs, and chickens and cultivate vegetables and herbs.1 He not only dehydrated the food leftovers from his and another seven neighboring households to make rabbit feed but also further mixed this feed with protein-rich rabbit droppings to serve to his chickens. The grass and other greens his rabbits discarded, on the other hand, fell from their elevated cages to the ground, where it was eaten by the guinea pigs, left to roam freely for this purpose. He was also using a portion of the animal excrement he collected to experiment with vermiculture (raising worms) and regularly fertilized his crops with chicken manure. He even fed worms from his vermiculture experiment to the chickens. His unique implementation of permaculture was a source of pride for the FANJNH, which considered his site one of the obligatory stops on its garden tours. I expected Manolo’s talk to be engaging, but, to my surprise, it was not. He started by dispassionately outlining his production endeavors, giving more information than the audience required about the specific nutritional needs of rabbits. Then he stopped abruptly and asked the audience if they had any questions. In answering one of the questions, he stated, “All that matters to me, in the end, is that waste goes up to my rooftop and comes down as money.” Although this statement was truth- 135 Global Networks and Cuban Urban Agriculture ful, Luis, a member of the FANJNH who worked closely with Manolo, turned to me and whispered, “Geez, he just threw away all the ethical principles of permaculture with a single sentence!” A young man with a background in agricultural sciences who had previously worked with the Cuban Association for Organic Agriculture (ACAO), Luis did not feel that there was anything wrong with producers making a living through the sale of their produce.2 However, in this context...