Paulo Mellett Permaculture Design

Well, I am back in Havana after a week and a bit at the India Hatuey agricultural research centre in Matanzas province, an hour and a half drive away from Havana. The Hatuey were a tribe of indigenous Cubans who were here when the Spanish turned up. You can guess what happened to them. In the dining hall/ cafeteria there is a big clay mural/sculpture of what Cuban archeologists have worked out their village life must have been like. There is forest and campfires. I look out the window and see cattle pasture and tractors.

Driving along the motorway (the main and only one that runs along the E-W spine of the country) there is NO traffic. We pass the occasional bus, and a few cars, but it is normal to be alone on the highway for several minutes at a time. Occasionally people stand at the roadside, or on the road itself, waving, sometimes with a fist full of money, trying to get a ride. There are different colored number plates in Cuba – blue means a government car, which must by law stop to pick people up until they are full, and either give them a free ride or charge 1 cuban peso (there are 24 cuban pesos to the cuban convertible peso, or CUC, which is worth about 1.3 US dollars. The tourist economy by and large runs on CUC and prices in Havana are about what you would expect to pay in London).

Luckily, we are in a car with orange plates – projects – so we dont have to stop. A good thing too, as we are bursting to the gills with people and bags. We arrive at the centre and are shown to our rooms – simple barrack style constructions with an AC unit and a shower (which we share with 4 frogs), and 3 beds in a room. There is also a telly – on which my roomates will watch every baseball game they can in their spare time. Baseball is the national passion and some of the course participants are mad for it. It arouses my passions almost as much as football (!). On the first night a frog jumps onto my chest just as I am drifting off to sleep. He leaps off when I start laughing, which continues for a few minutes.

The course starts and I am stressed, making some last minute changes to the structure with Roberto, worrying a little that I have bitten off more than I can chew, but it all soon dissipates and the easy Cuban manner rubs off on me as the first day goes by. As the week goes on we get to know each other and it becomes a lot of fun – the Cubans also really getting into the subject matter, and the games we interpsperse the sessions with – they particularly liked the penguin race, which I shall not try to describe here. Involves thigh slapping and waving to the Queen of England, jumping imaginary logs and hanging sharp left and right turns.

They are fun – a lot of fun actually. One night we have a birthday to celebrate, and out comes cake and rum and people start singing and dancing. One guy in particular seemed to delight in my protestations of not being able to drink much, and took it upon himself to help me learn. I have some great chats with people, finding out about their lives and what it is like to live inside this system. There is a sadness on their part that they are not allowed/able to travel, and I am accutely aware of the things they dont have. My roomate is a university teacher and makes about 25 CUC a month, which is what 2 tourists spend on a lunch in Havana (about 20 quid to us Brits). Certain things like clothes and soap are generally only available in CUCs, and it is hard for them to get access to these things. But I wonder how much of that is the fault of the economic blockade. Food is available in the municple markets in cuban pesos, which is a lot cheaper. They are happy, well fed (well, chubby for the most part) and highly intelligent and articulate. They are also, I think, aware of the good things that they enjoy in Cuba, in comparison to many other carribean and latin american countries, and are proud to be Cuban. We speak a little about history, and Fidel, and they only say good things about this to me – although they might just be being careful – and there seems to be a joy that bubbles up regularly, despite the complaining that comes out sometimes.

One evening, to have a break from a particularly intense part of the course with a lot crammed in, I asked them if they would like to see a film on the projector – specifically the new Che Guevarra film. They said yes, and we sat down in the lecture hall and watched it, with a big mural of one of Che’s quotes on the wall adjacent to the screen. Alongside Che’s quote are taped up the flipchart sheets from the sessions, full of permaculture principles and sketches of chinampas and water harvesting earthworks. I like to think Che would approve of permaculture – being fundamentally about providing everyone with a dignified life – I passed by the big memorial to him at the entrance to the farm, on one of my evening runs, and felt very much the time that has passed, and the changes that are sweeping this country (and the world). In front of a mural of Che with rucksack and rifle in Bolivia just before his death, I spoke a few words about my revolution, disguised as organic gardening, and that I was here to help with the evolution of his.

Another evening we also watched the film ‘Baraka’ which has no words, and tells the story of humanity and the current environmental crisis with film and images from all around the world – it was great to be able to allow people to travel the world and see faraway places, although they found it a bit frustrating that they did not know where many of the places were, or what they were seeing – I gave a commentary for a while, but crept off to bed before the end.

On the way into India Hatuey we passed through the largest area of citrus plantations on the planet – row after row of trees, which used to export vast ammounts to the world before florida cornered the market. Now there has been a disease which has killed off large swathes of the trees, and the drought which Cuba is suffering has also dried out the land in between the trees. There are also large burned areas. It is a stark example of the legacy of soviet style agronomy that this country has from its past, and of the choices it faces between adopting sustainable broadscale agroforestry or turning into a dustbowl – Cuba’s number one environmental problem is soil loss and desertification.

There is plenty of abandoned land in the fields by the motorway, large charred areas where fire has passed, and dusty pasture where bony cows still graze. Also we see large irrigation rigs, like the ribcages of huge dionosaurs, stretching over potato crops – in may areas farmers are obliged by law to grow potatoes, and are also forced to spray a systemic fungicide which (for now) stops the mildew that kills them here – it is completely the wrong thing to be growing in this climate, and I listen to the stories of “the war of the potato” from some of the course participants who tell me (some angrily) of how they spent many years battling the different fungal diseases that nature has thrown at the potato monoculture. As the course progresses, and without prompting from me, some begin to talk about how crazy this is. But it is understandable given the necesity they had to grow food for the population during the special period: they had to survive.

There are also areas of thick spiky forest where nature has been allowed to grow back, to an amazing degree in 6 years or so, which gives me hope for the regeneration of the landscape if people work with natural succession and get tree canopy back up over multi-layer productive systems. Coffee, taro, sweet potato and manioc all grow fine under this system, so they still get a good staple carbohydrate yield and a cash crop.

There are great contributions from course participants – one guy has been making mycorrhizal innoculant from native soil organisms, and gives a presentation on how to do this – there is much horizontal learning where we are all sharing things with each other and new ideas are springing up. The concept of food forests and accelerated succession are, I think, one of the main new things to them, and they really get it and like the idea. It also ties in very well with the concept of water management and swales (water harvesting ditches) that is a part of the “how to do more with less” pitch we have for permaculture. I feel really happy that people are inspired and ready to start trying things out on their land.

We have rearranged the traditional permaculture design course format to fit the time that people were able to come on the course for – 6 days. We worked long and hard days to cover the theory, and will now complete the amount of time required for a full PDC to be awarded – 72 hours – by spending 3 days at each province, supporting the participants with going through a design process for their own land. I am looking forward to this very much.

On the last day of the course we went to the beach just below the bay of pigs to go through an observation and mapping excercise. We all squeezed into a rickety old Russian bus and crossed the country to the south coast. The beach was beautiful, and we hunkered down with whiteboard and lunch under some grape trees (trees that grow grapelike fruit! Apparently very tasty) and split up into groups for the mapping excercise. A hundred metres down the beach someone had a soundsystem pumping out of a truck, and a barbecue with the ubiquitous pig and white bread on the go.

We drove back through the largest wetlands in the carribean (now drying out) just in time for a mega rainstorm – which started at a quick toilet stop at a crocodile farm. It was the only time I have seen Cubans run, to get into the bus and out of the rain. Sitting in the bus I felt an urge to go outside and dance around naked in it after weeks of humidity and dust, but I refrained. Besides, I am told that this is reserved for the first rain of May!