Sowing Change: The Making of Havana's Urban Agriculture

Notes

155 Notes Introduction 1. Cuba is technically an archipelago, but it is commonly referred to as la isla (the island) by most Cubans. While many in and outside of Cuba have emphasized the insular character of the country post-1959, as will become evident in the pages that follow, Cuba is a place that has always been constituted through its relationships to other places in what Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992) have rightly described as an always hierarchically organized world. As suggested by the introduction’s subtitle, I here draw on Doreen Massey’s (2004) work on a global sense of place that works with a nonessentialist definition of place as internally diverse and resulting from relationships that spread outward beyond the locality. 2. The work of Eckstein (2004) on migration as well as that of the Cuban economist Pedro Monreal on the exportation of Cuban experts (cited in García Quiñones 2001) vividly illustrates the contributions that these worldly connections and their associated remittances have made to the Cuban economy. 3. The phrase la revolución is commonly used in Cuba to refer to the societal changes that began on January 1, 1959, when the leaders of the 26th of July Movement came to power after overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista. I will henceforth adhere to this usage of the phrase. 4. Although publications in this area abound, I have found the perspectives of some authors particularly relevant to my own work. These include Ariana Hernández-Reguant’s (2004) arguments on shifting perspectives on the communitarian ethos in the culture industry, Sean Brotherton’s (2008) analysis of the rise of hybrid subjectivities and changing statecraft in the health service sector, and Adrian Hearn’s (2008) description of reconfigured state projects in the field of community development. 5. I here use the term urban agriculture as it was used in the early 1990s in Cuba, to refer solely to primary food production activities in the city. My emphasis on edible products here departs from more encompassing definitions of urban agriculture that include the production of nonedible products, such as ornamental plants, for commercialization purposes (United Nations 156 Notes to Pages 3–8 Development Programme 1996). Although a similarly comprehensive definition is also used at present in the Cuban context, I have chosen to retain the initial definition because it still reflects the way in which the majority of those I work with use the term. 6. It should be noted that the term parcela is used in the agriculture sector to refer to individual plots of land but in the urban agriculture field the term denotes a small garden located on public land. 7. Organoponic gardens consist of compost-filled, raised beds with a few lines of drip irrigation that make cultivation possible on sites with unsuitable or no soil. 8. Unless a published source is identified, citations like this one were drawn from interviews or taped group meetings that took place in Spanish and were later transcribed and translated by the author. 9. These headlines were featured in a number of different magazines and newspapers written by different journalists between 1991 and 1992 (Bedriñana Isart 1991, 1992; Gumá 1992; Mayoral 1992; Shelton 1992a, 1992b). 10. Although, as noted in Table 1, there are two types of organoponic gardens: the high-yield organoponics (organopónicos de alto rendimiento, OAR) and the Popular organoponics (organopónicos populares), henceforth, I will follow common usage and use the general term organopónico to refer only to the OARs. 11. Their ages ranged from thirty-five to ninety, with thirty (71 percent) of them over age fifty-five. The predominance of men and older people in this sample is usually reported as the demographic norm among small-scale urban farmers in Havana (Murphy 1999; Cruz Hernández and Sánchez Medina 2001). 12. In my analysis of the information collected, I used qualitative data software to assist me in identifying the variables that might account for significant differences in perspective. Included here were factors such as gender, age, level of education, employment status, current occupation, form of involvement in urban agriculture (e.g., producer or service provider), formal institutional affiliation, and land tenure status over related production sites (private versus usufruct). Only those variables directly addressed in the chapters were found to be significant to the questions guiding this book. 13. The U.S. dollar was withdrawn from circulation in 2004 and replaced by the equivalent Cuban currency known as...