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Published: October 3rd 2014
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Healing the Land (blog by Stan Dotson)
Thanks to Ofelia Ortega, ethics professor and past president of the seminary, there is an amazing organic garden (more like a small farm) adjacent to the chapel here, with rich, loamy black soil that produces a wide variety of fruits and veggies. Kim has enjoyed volunteering there, making friends with Guillermo and Duvier and Chino and other workers as she gets her hands in the ground every Friday. Ofelia’s beautiful brainchild came out of the harsh necessity of Cuba’s “Special Period”, the decade of the 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union, when all their economic support vanished and they were left to fend for themselves.
Here’s a question lots of visitors have after spending some time in Cuba: how is it that a tropical island with so much land isn’t able to feed itself Why does Cuba have to import so much of its food? It’s not just a question for visitors, virtually everybody here has an opinion on the matter, and as Cuba has one of the most highly educated populaces in the hemisphere, these opinions are often debated with a great deal of sophistication,
at a level of economics that is generally over my head. That includes a night in a Baptist camp dorm room where a roomful of young people argued vehemently well into the night over the causes and possible solutions to Cuba’s agricultural challenges.
With my caveat of ignorance laid on the table, I want to share some of what I am hearing and learning. Cheo our good friend in La Vallita, is someone I’m learning a lot from. Cheo, husband of Sila, of our sister church pastor, is the manager of a cooperative, a relatively new farming system in Cuba in which groups of people go in together on a piece of land to cooperatively farm it. When we last visited Cheo, he had just gotten back from a farm extension seminar, and he shared the manual with me and explained some of what it was talking about. The introduction began with a quote from early in the revolution, “El Comandante ha llegado y dice, ‘Pare.’” Translated: The commander (Fidel) has arrived, and he says, ‘Stop’.” It refers to the early stages of the Castro government, when agrarian reform was top on their list of revolutionary changes.
Around 80% land had been controlled by big business, largely US interests such as the big sugar companies. This is what Castro was stopping, and among the first laws passed was the prohibition of large land holdings. It was a Year of Jubilee enactment, divvying the land up among the population and giving the peasants a chance to have their own parcel.
Unfortunately, among the “errors of the Revolution” that people lament was what then happened with the land. The Soviets came in as “sugar daddies” so to speak, investing heavily in the infrastructure of the new Cuba. What the Soviets brought was a total commitment to the Green Revolution’s highly industrialized agriculture (no doubt the U.S would have done the same if we had befriended instead of antagonized the new government). For thirty years petroleum and chemical based farming was employed, and by the time the Soviet Union collapsed and they withdrew their support, the damage to the land was done. Depending on who you ask, anywhere from 25% to 50% of the land was depleted and unusable.
The Comandante did not have to say “pare” (stop) in this “Special Period” of the
90s. Everything came to a screeching halt on its own, and in the crisis of the time that threatened starvation, Cuba quickly adjusted and adopted many techniques of organic farming, permaculture, and urban gardening. Along with the seminary’s organopónico, the Fraternity of Baptist’s nation-wide project of patio gardening has also become a model. Cooperative farming, which employs our friend Cheo in La Vallita, was another of the recent innovations.
Cheo is very proud of their work to undo the damage done by decades of bad farming. He realizes that the Cuban population as a whole is impatient, and it is hard for people to accept the length of time it will take to heal the land and make it productive again. He also realizes that Cuba has another perhaps bigger problem and challenge: demographics. When industrial farming took over the country, they needed less of a labor force, and masses of country people who were left without work migrated to the cities. Additionally, the plummeting birth rate in Cuba, coupled with the widespread emmigration of young people to other countries, has left them with precious few human resources in the next generation. The new farming techniques (which are really built on the old/ancient wisdom of pre-industrial farming), require a greater labor force, but the demographics don’t give them much hope for supplying the needed workers. Cheo has lots of ideas and answers as to how to address the land management issues, but draws a blank on what to do about the lack of people available to do the work.
Something in this history reminds me of the phrase “something happened on the way to...” The Revolution was initially in large part about land and food, about re-distributing the land and ensuring no one went hungry. In those beginning years (pre-Soviet years), virtually everybody went out to the countryside to help with the farming. Ofelia tells stories of church groups going out to harvest cane. The early years of the Revolution generated a great deal of respect for farming and for the farmers, for the wisdom of country people who knew how to handle a team of oxen, for example. But something happened along the way, and that respect began to fade, until urban Cubans began reconjuring the same old prejudices against country people that exist virtually everywhere, incuding in our own culture. Sila, who didn’t grow up on a farm, even talks about some of the questions and jeers she got from her family when they found out she wanted to marry Cheo, a “guajiro” (country bumpkin). As it turns out, this country bumpkin is one of the current heroes in the continuing work of the revolution, in the attempt to heal the land and increase the capacity of Cubans to feed themselves.
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Mahan Siler
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