Sowing Change: The Making of Havana's Urban Agriculture

3. Place-Bound: Becoming an Urban Farmer in Havana

51 3 Place-Bound Becoming an Urban Farmer in Havana I was first introduced to Manolo, a rabbit breeder from the humble municipality of El Cerro, in early 2001, when Havana was changing so rapidly I never knew what to expect on each visit. Every time I returned someone I knew had left Cuba in search of a better life overseas ; new hotels, restaurants, and hard-currency stores had appeared in places where none had existed before; and the old American cars that once dominated the roads seemed increasingly outnumbered by new imports. Among the few things that remained constant for me over the next decade were Manolo’s hospitality and the decor of his sparsely furnished living room: his bike parked in a corner, a hard sofa, and a couple of rocking chairs placed in a semicircle to one side; on one wall, a large framed picture of Jesus; on the other, two pictures from his fishing days. One afternoon, as we chatted about life, he pointed to the fishing pictures and told me that he had owned a boat for many years and, had he wanted to, he could have left Cuba but, he explained, “I am not interested in leaving. I am not interested in living elsewhere, particularly not the U.S. I would like to go to Canada but the climate is too harsh.” He laughed and continued: “Spain, I don’t like it either. Besides, I don’t have to go anywhere; my neighbors, my neighborhood, this is my family. The neighbors have known me since I was a child. Do you understand? Why would I want to go anywhere where people don’t even know who I am? Here everyone knows me and I am a popular guy.” Manolo did not mention any hardships at the beginning of our conversation , but later he did touch on the issue of food scarcity several 52 Sowing Change times. When he discussed why people had, since the early 1990s, turned in greater numbers to cultivating vegetable gardens or breeding rabbits at home in a place like Havana, he summed up the situation with the following words: “Household heads in particular feel the necessity of feeding their young. So it is they who sacrifice themselves by entering this world [of urban agriculture].” Although some Cubans—aided by new lucrative work in the tourist industry, remittances, or new work and study opportunities overseas —were able to fend off (or altogether escape) the worst effects of the still lingering crisis, not everyone was so lucky.1 For many Havana residents , the “new” global sense of place mentioned in the Introduction was paired up with feelings of scarcity, despair, and isolation. For many of the people I worked with, their world shrank rather than expanded as Cuba supposedly opened to the world; their feeling of being rooted in place was not erased but ironically amplified as myriad transnational flows of people, ideas, capital, and goods increasingly crisscrossed national boundaries. While in some ways the urban farmers I worked with appeared to be quintessential postmodern subjects that “have entered into a new condition of neighborliness, even with those most distant from [themselves]” (Appadurai 1990, 2), they remained remarkably place-focused and, most of all, place-bound. This chapter sketches how small-scale urban agriculture practitioners associated with parcelas and patios experience their neighborhood, and their production sites, and how this experience, in turn, connects to citizens’ experience of changing material circumstances during the Special Period. So far as this chapter considers the everyday, nonpublicized , and even underground narratives and experiences of small-scale producers pertaining to the spaces they inhabit, it not only begins to reveal the lived dimension of parcelas and patios but also throws light on the perspective of a segment of civil society seldom given a voice in official narratives within Cuba and also largely ignored in the international literature that celebrates Cuban urban agriculture.2 The analysis reveals common, as well as divergent, perspectives among practitioners on the significance of parcelas and patios and their ideal relationship with the broader community and the state. In addition 53 Place-Bound to illustrating the privatization of public spaces involved in the making of parcelas, the analysis shows the impact that the gardens in general have on producers’ sense of well-being and their feeling of connectedness to the world around them. These feelings, as will be seen, often...