After 4 days in Havana I have fallen in love with this crazy, dirty, colourful, vibrant city. There is nothing I can say that really can convey the feeling of this place – it is amazing to see a city so full of creativity and ingenuity to keep it running despite restrictions of almost everything that flows into a normal city, amazing to not feel the pull of corporate advertising on your brain every place that you look, and… to be in a social space that is entirely different from anything I have encountered so far. A canadian filmmaker staying at our hotel described it as “ like a contest for making ornate wedding cakes in which a quarter of the cakes have been removed, a quarter perfectly preserved, a quarter smashed up and a quarter rebuilt with the bits that were left”. That comes close.
After a first night in the hotel Riviera (an 1950s ex-mafia concrete skyscraper on the seafront) we have escaped the spanish tourists and are staying in a small ‘casa popular’ which is basically a b+b hostel for tourists. This is cheaper and we dont have to spend 50 minutes a day waiting for the lifts. And you can open the windows. It is a beautiful apartment building right in the middle of Havana and a short walk from… well, everything really.
Soooooooo much to say and not much time – this is just a quick one to let you all know that I am still alive and OK (and very well!) Internet is very hard to get access to here, and costs about 4 quid for half an hours access….I am very busy preparing for the course – so I will be more communicative, and have time to write grand essays after the course when I can type things up on the laptop and log on on the the wifi of the central hotel – I am here in the lobby at the moment on the laptop (so glad I bought it!) and it is like something out of James bond – picture winding marble staircase and palm fronds, cuban music from 3 guys in cream shirts and the tang of cigar smoke in the air. I am sitting here in a grubby vest and sandles while australians and brits drink piña coladas around me. Kind of weird – tourist income is something the Cubans rely on at the moment, but it is a world I really dont feel a part of at all.
Outside in the street it is hot and sweaty, palm trees next to old cadilacs and pimped-up Russian Ladas (the car) with leopard skin seat covers, horse-drawn carriages (for the tourists) and also a wide range of people from the guys sieving building rubble to get the lime mortar and sand out to reuse in other work, to doctors cycling to work, modern, london style bendy buses and huge old dilapidated 1950s american lorries carrying sacks of spuds or onions. Such a mind-bending colourful mish-mash. Lots of edge effect at work here!!!
Today we had a meeting with Roberto Perez, a Cuban Permaculture teacher who works for FANJ (Fundación de Antonio Nuñez Jímenez para naturaleza y el hombre), the main organisation disseminating permaculture within Cuba. We discussed the PDC course that we are going to co-teach in three days time, along with Aili, a Finnish friend of mine who completed her PDC in Australia with Bill Mollison, Geoff Lawton and Gregg Knibbs and has been working recently in Lima introducing Permaculture to CAN, the Andean Community (a high level cross – country political body working across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Columbia. But that is another story…)
I have come here on the invitation of the British organisation Garden Organic (formerly HDRA), who have been working with partners in Cuba for the past 2 years to combat the effects of a drought that the country has been suffering in certain provinces. My hosts here who are organising the course (and sorting out my visa) are INCA – the national institute for agricultural science, who are a part of the ministry of education. The project has been doing some great work with participatory plant breeding, seed saving and mycorrhizal root innoculation, and have begun moving out of the reductionist mentality so traditional in agronomy and realise that they need to start looking into new growing systems. That is where permaculture comes in, and I am lucky enough to be a small part of this.
As some of you may know, Cuba has its fair share of permaculture projects already established, but this is almost entirely focused in the context of urban agriculture. In the countryside, conventional farming techniques (even though more organic than not) hold sway, and a spiral of degradation and soil loss continues – there is a serious desertification in many areas, with the impacts of treeless monoculture and ploughing being exacerbated by the hurricanes, floods and droughts of increasingly unstable weather patterns symptomatic of climate change – a new global pattern that is becoming all too familiar to us.
The course is to be held at an agricultural research station in the province of Matanzas, to the east of Havana. It will be a slightly different format from the normal pdc, in that it is difficult to get people to come for more than a week, particularly farmers who need to get back to their land. Due to this, we will be teaching the majority of the course over a rather intense 6 days, and then following up with a 3 day visit to each of the areas of Cuba that the participants live – the 28 participants come from 4 main areas. In these 3 days we will complete a design exercise on the farms where the participants work, and also begin implementation of certain aspects, by way of in-depth practicals. In this way we will be able to cover the full PDC syllabus, and also complete the requisite number of hours, but tailor it to the unique Cuban social and environmental context. Roberto actually remarked that in many ways, this is the ideal situation, as we will be able to establish the beginning of several trial projects in places where people will continue them and (I think) which can potentially grow to be dissemination centres for their area.
To this end, today’s meeting with Roberto was invaluable – he has been teaching permaculture for more that 13 years, and knows a huge amount about the complex and diverse biological systems in Cuba (he originally trained as a biologist) as well as knowing what works with Cubans (apparently the concept of zoning is sometimes a challenge). He is an amazing character – very very bright, full of energy and knowledge, and also a lot of fun. I am very happy to have his involvement in this course, and I feel incredibly humble and grateful that I have the opportunity to come here – many times I have been asked, and have thought, “what the hell have I got to teach the Cubans?” Roberto asserts, quite a lot, in the case of these particular course participants, who are a mixture of agricultural researchers and students, as well as farmers from affected areas. We are talking ecological literacy, holistic systems thinking and getting out of reductionist agronomy mode.
I also see a major part of my role here as being able to help Roberto’s small organisation FANJ connect with and gain influence (vis a vis the spread of permaculture) with the much larger and prodigious INCA. The world of Cuban institutional politics is one that I do not pretend to even begin to understand, but I get the impression that up until this point the potential of permaculture for the countryside in Cuba is still not understood by the major government institutions here, despite the successes of urban permaculture programs. Somehow me being an outsider from a British partner institution has some sort of respectability or catches the attention in a different way. Whatever, it is an opportunity and we are riding the wave! It is all a little surreal and I still can’t quite believe that I am here.
My other contribution is in the realm of zone 0 – the built environment – I am, amongst other things, an environmental builder – mainly focusing on strawbale in europe for the last year, not so relevant to Cuab – and I have studied an architecture masters at CAT (centre for alternative technology) in Wales. Eco-building is something that Roberto and FANJ have identified as a key next step for the permaculture movement here, and INCA are also interested in this. In this respect I will be focusing on assessing the potential for using local natural building materials – clay, fibre and timber – as well as introducing the concepts of passive design for climate control (passive ventilation etc) and integration of buildings into landscaping and vegetation for shade and cooling, as well as protection from hurricanes – Cuba lost more than 70 000 houses in 2008 hurricanes, and had many more badly damaged that they are struggling to repair. The availability of building materials here is restricted, particularly in the case of modern industrial materials such as steel and cement: I will write another piece on this later…
Roberto’s organisation FANJ has acquired some large areas of land in the countryside where they hope to start up model ecovillage projects/ training centres. I will be spending another month here after the course to discuss the establishment of a training of trainers project here in environmental building in a permaculture design context.
So – I must get back to my course preparation… I have a couple of GB of spanish power points to look through courtesy of the Galician permaculture network (thanks José) and a third of Geoff Lawton’s food forest film left to translate and subtitle (thank you linux!)
More soon – by all means email me at paulomellettski@gmail.com