Sowing Change: The Making of Havana's Urban Agriculture

1. Shifting Socialist Spatial Dreams: Institutional Visions and Revisions

11 1 Shifting Socialist Spatial Dreams Institutional Visions and Revisions At the corner of Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue—one of the widest avenues in the city—in the municipality of Playa, in the district of Miramar, amid embassies and old mansions inhabited by diplomats, Cuban celebrities, and high government functionaries, one finds an organopónico: a large lot of approximately one hectare with rows of raised container beds used for growing a wide array of vegetables and herbs, including lettuce, spinach, and radishes (see Figure 1.1). This was the first garden of its type in Havana. It was named INRE after the National Institute of State Reserves, from which came the person responsible for the garden’s creation: Brigadier General Moisés Sio Wong.1 A veteran of the 1959 revolutionary struggle, Sio Wong grew up in Havana. As if to underscore the agricultural potential of the area, he told me he still remembered how, in prerevolutionary times, U.S. ferries frequently docked in the city harbor to pick up tomatoes grown in Cuba. Being of Chinese background, he had especially fond memories of the vegetable gardens, then located in various parts of the city, tended by Chinese horticulturalists who peddled their produce door-to-door. These gardens, which were remembered fondly by other Havana residents of the same generation, disappeared after the revolution as the city modernized, and this kind of private production and sale of fresh produce was halted in favor of a state-run food distribution system.2 As a young revolutionary, General Sio Wong had envisioned momentous transformations for his country and had enthusiastically participated in the “revolutionary process” that had aimed to turn Cuba into 12 Sowing Change a modern socialist nation. At that time, he could never have imagined finding himself, at the turn of the millennium, talking to curious foreigners like me, in his office at the National Institute of State Reserves, about farming without tractors or chemical inputs in one of the poshest areas of Havana, on a site that was not naturally suited for agricultural production. Then again, these were exceptional times that called for the implementation of extraordinary ideas if the government was to retain its commitment to ensuring national food security. After reviewing the priority given to food security in socialist Cuba, this chapter outlines the manner in which the government, in an attempt to deal with an unprecedented food crisis, made room for urban agriculture in post-1989 Havana. Specifically, the chapter considers how this effort was accompanied by a reconceptualization of agricultural production, urban land use, and the ultimate role of the state in the development of the nation. Previously, the modus operandi in sectors like agriculture and urban planning fit a pattern James Scott (1998) attributes to “authoritarian, high-modernist states,” which privilege state-centralized, large-scale projects that rest on global abstractions and blind confidence in scientific and technological progress. In the field of agriculture, as will be seen, the Cuban government had taken pride in having a highly industrialized, large-scale sector reliant on the latest chemical inputs and other scientific innovations. When it came to city planning and renovation schemes, the emphasis had been on the rational allocation of services and resources through centralized planning that excluded primary food production from the urban core. In this context, the shift to urban agriculture represented a radical break that, from the perspectives of state actors outlined in this chapter , exemplified the kinds of adaptations, tensions, and negotiations that have characterized the Special Period in Times of Peace (hereafter Special Period)—a phrase introduced by the Cuban government to refer to the series of economic adjustments and related deprivations brought about by the acute economic crisis that followed the breakup of the Soviet bloc. This exposition reveals how those having official authority to regulate and design space do not represent a single, univocal perspective, as authors like Certeau (1988) presume, but rather reflect multivocal 13 Shifting Socialist Spatial Dreams and ambiguous projects that allow for contestation and revision “from below” as well as from within established authority circles—a point that is particularly important to make when it comes to a place like Cuba, whose state apparatus is often caricatured as monolithic, homogeneous, and unchanging. Ultimately, the analysis presented here and in the following chapter illustrates a vigorous struggle under way within and across Cuban state institutions as the country was...