Havana
February - March
2000

Introduction
There I was again, raking stones off the new planting areas at huerto Guanabana. I spent three months in Havana in 1996, working with people Jorge, Sierra and others like them. They and tens of thousands other Habaneros had been forced, by the needs of the Special Period, to take up a new occupation, gardening. Before the early 1990s urban gardens were extremely rare, in fact the city province as a whole relied on other regions for almost all its foodstuffs. Now the situation is rather different, 41% of the province’s land is in agricultural use and tens of thousands of market gardens, allotments and small holdings are cultivated by enthusiastic residents. And it’s all done using organic methods.

History
In Cuba “ecological agriculture” had been investigated by a small number of scientists since the 1970’s. The onset of the Special Period left them in a position of importance in the agricultural establishment. They developed organic systems of cultivation which helped Cuba past the threat of serious hunger in 1993-4. These new agricultural methods saw traditional and modern organic ways of cultivation enhanced by the support of Cuba’s scientists who produced many forms of biopesticides, fertilisers and soil inoculants. Oxen teams replaced tractors, compost replaced chemical plant foods, and beneficial insects and micro-organisms replaced toxic pesticides. The details of this massive change were published in the book The Greening of the Revolution (published by Ocean Press, Melbourne 1994).

As these changes were taking place on the farms, equally significant changes were taking place in Havana. The provincial government let people take possession of unused land, to use as gardens (huertos). They encouraged the construction of market gardens (organoponicos) and workplace gardens (autoconsumos) and set up shops to supply seeds and tools. The provincial Ministry of Agriculture set up an Urban Agriculture department to look after these different groups.

Urban Agriculture in the City of Havana
That was what I found in 1996, a healthy network of gardening clubs and individual gardens, a supportive department within the MinAg and a general optimism about the ability of organic agriculture to prove its worth, in the face of chemical skepticism. Four years later and there has been a continued development. The number of home gardeners hasn’t changed much but the land under commercial cultivation has continued to steadily rise, the support mechanisms have grown enormously.

“What’s the Urban Agriculture Department doing ?” I asked. It doesn’t exist any more I was told, dissolved into the Havana MinAg, as the whole ministry took the ecological agriculture message on board. The huertos, and organoponicos, the autoconsumos and shops are now separate sections in the Ministry. In 1996 the aim was a shop in each of the fifteen districts. Four years later there are not fifteen, but twenty three shops, each one acting as a gardening/farming advice centre as well as source of seeds and tools. Food production in Havana, negligible before the Special Period, stood at 40,000 tonnes in 1995, 80,000 in 1996 and 115,000 in 1998. This is all organic, the use of “agro-toxins” not allowed in the province.

At huerto Guanabana it’s the same people as four years ago, six residents of the block of flats adjacent ,and occasional help from friends. They now have most of the plot under cultivation and are selling their surplus, mostly kitchen and medicinal herbs. Over in Havana Vieja Fernandini, one of the students on the first Cuban permaculture course, has doubled the size of his garden and is starting to teach gardening himself. Down in Santa Suarez, Justo and Carmen are promoting patio gardening and developing a new garden with a local school. Carmen works for the FNH.
See Report by M. Novo (former head of the Urban Agriculture Department)

La Fundacion (de Antonio Nuñez Jiminez) de la Naturaleza y Hombre (FNH)
Jiminez was one of Fidel’s revolutionary cohorts. Explorer, writer, scientist, he was one of the Cuban Revolution’s great cultural figures. He established the FNH to house his huge library, his manuscripts and collections of art and artefacts, to do environmental research and to publish his work, and that of his fellow scientists. The FNH became involved in the organic agriculture movement when it became the partner organisation for an Australian supported permaculture project in Havana. This lead to the current point where the foundation receives funding from several foreign organisations, and runs a number of different projects supporting the sustainable urban gardening movement and related activities.

Two connected projects I visited were a community recycling scheme and plant, and a school garden and educational project. With buckets and boxes for recyclables in homes and in public places, with two collectors with bikes and trailors, the plant is supplied. Material also comes from hotels. The metals and glass are sorted out and the organic material is composted. The finished compost will be used on the school garden. There are five schools in the scheme, classes from all regularly attending a special school in the middle of the Metropolitan Park, where the park’s institute holds lessons on environmental issues.

Other projects run by the FNH include courses in permaculture and the development of demonstration gardens throughout the city, community composting schemes and patio and rooftop gardens.
Towards a Culture of the Nature More information on the FNH

Proyecto Communitario: Conservación de Alimentos
Fresh food is often difficult to obtain in the hot wet summer months, the crops growing are mostly long season crops. This food preservation project is the creation of a dynamic couple Vilda and Pepe. Vilda studied agriculture at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen. For the last few years they have been teaching people how to preserve the wide range of fruit and vegetables grown in the cooler, drier winter months. At their centre, in Marianao, they have displays of more than 100 different preserves and pickles, in jars and bottles, packets of sundried vegetables and herbs.

Vilda and Pepe have a weekly TV programme, regularly visit other provinces and at the centre this last year have received 2500 visitors, usually more than 20 delegations a month, from as many as 40 different countries.

They have developed a garden at the pre school nursery opposite, which last year produced 500 kilos of dried food, spices and herbs. This is sufficient to fill the needs of the children and staff there and at another nursery just down the road. 220 children and staff supplied with all the herbs, spices and medicinal plants they need, and some food as well.

Another project on which they work is a part of an ambitious plan for the reforestation of Havana. The intention is to plant eighteen million trees of which two and a half million will be fruit trees. Their part involves planting fruit trees along the roadsides and streets throughout Marianao. They are co-operating with a group of workers at the Botanic Gardens who are propagating and growing fruit trees, experimenting with uncommon foreign species, selecting those suitable for the Cuban climate.
To diversify food choice More on Community Food Preservation Project

The Future
Havana’s experiment with urban agriculture is not unique. Older readers will remember Dig for Victory . Other cities in recent times have responded to crisis with such a movement. The difference in Cuba is that the movement has not faded when the crisis has passed. Rather it has continued to develop and flourish. The crisis allowed advocates of sustainable food production sufficient time and space to prove the value of their ideas, and to persuade people, both on the street and in the corridors of power, to actively support them. In 1996 there was much talk of the pragmatic nature of the change, how when things were normalised there would be a return, in the main, to chemical based agriculture. Now that looks a whole lot less certain.

Agriculture
In the countyside the same story is found. For example, in 1959 the number of oxen teams in use in Cuba was about 300,000. With mechanisation this had diminished to less than 100,000 teams by 1990. Ten years later the number is back above 300,000 and still rising, the advantages the animals have over tractors in many situations being well proven. “Backwards into the future” was one Cuban agronomist’s comment. The rise of support for organic agriculture has magnified related interests like sustainable energy sources, appropriate technology and community development. Demonstration and experimentation centres have been opened all over the island, travelling libraries and extension schools been established.

Last year the Organic Agriculture Group from Cuba was awarded a “Right Livelihood” Prize (also called the Alternative Nobel Prize) “for development of organic agriculture in Cuba which has helped their country overcome one of the most serious food crises in its history, and has shown that organic agriculture is a key to both environmental sustainability and food security. The Jury recognises in GAO an exemplary combination of grassroots commitment and agricultural expertise that has brought organic agriculture to the heart of the Cuban food system.”
See Peter Rosset's article: Cuba: A Successful Case Study of Sustainable Agriculture

Cuba Organic Support Group
British connections with Cuba’s green revolution began in the mid nineties. HDRA is Britain’s biggest organic gardeners’organisation. They ran a consultancy for Havana’s urban agriculture department in early 1996. Individual HDRA members like myself had also become involved. I worked with an Australian permaculture project in winter/spring 1996. In 1997 HDRA organised an ecotour. The participants and other interested individuals then formed the Cuba Organic Support Group (COSG) with the aim of publicising the developments in Cuba and raising funds to support them in practical ways.

Since then the group has sent tools and useful literature to many different projects in Cuba. A second ecotour was organised by COSG members in 1998 and then in January this year a gardening brigade went to Havana. They worked on several different projects, the most significant of which being the creation of a new garden for a nursery school near the Plaza de la Revolucion. I visited the area a few weeks later and discovered that British gardeners had gained a reputation for working miracles. What had been a rubbish dump was now a tidy and productive area. Inspired by what had been done, school children, teachers and local residents had continued developing the garden.