When necessity strikes...

There are many people more qualified to go into Cuba’s recent history than me (not excluding my favourite history teacher who informed me she as tuning in!) but it does need touching upon as I attempt to account for the birth of Alamar’s organic farm, so please bear with me…

Cuba once produced food for 40 million people. The USA owned half of the land and most of the sugar factories – until the birth of the Soviet Union that is, when Cuba did a straight swap for the USSR who began buying much of the 8 00 000 tonnes of sugar that Cuba produced. And until the 1980s at least, agriculture was mostly un-mechanised and food was produced in the county by the (80%) rural population. Along crept the 1990s however, and the machines, DDT and rural to urban migration arrived. Cuba got a taste of the green revolution; just enough to create a dependency on cheap oil. But neither the intensive agriculture nor the security that came with the arrival of oil was to last.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba went into free fall; GDP fell by 34% in the 4 years from 1989 to 1993, 80% of export and import markets disappeared overnight and oil imports dropped by more than half. Cuba’s ‘Special Period’ had begun. 

In other words, Cuba was experiencing what the rest of the world can only imagine, study and theorise; Peak Oil. Suddenly life as they knew it was over; blackouts were common, busses stopped running, factories closed and food became scarce for the first time. What had previously been a relatively hard life became a very real question of survival.  

When I arrived Miguel Salcines, the charismatic founder and president of the Organopónico (and also Isis’ father) he recounted to me some of this history and much more (which I’ll cover in the weeks to come), but the single most important point to impress upon me was without a doubt this; that the birth of the country’s 200 or so organopónicos, including his, was for one reason and one reason only; necessity.

“Either we produce food, or we starve”

And that was it. Not to charge a premium for organically produced crops, nor to experiment and not even for the good of the environment (that came later…) And in the land where not even money can buy you eggs or milk sometimes, I no longer find this reality quite so hard to imagine. If there is one thing that puts the academic studies, numerous theories and meticulous planning to test, it’s necessity.

And the rest is history; a fully functioning, economically successful, socially and environmentally responsible organic cooperative grew in a small suburban town in the East of Havana. Today it covers over 10 hectares and produces over 400 tonnes of vegetables a year - everything from high value mangos and mint leaves to ornamental plants and sweet potato – all with the help of billions of Red Californian worms, farmed ladybirds of all sorts and over 160 people (over 40 of which are females and a large percentage those above 50).

But not quite all is history; despite tending to talk about the ‘Special Period’’ in the past tense, if you ask a Cuban when this periodo especial se acabó, the answer is never. Estamos en ello, and no one knows when we’ll escape. Signs of change are coming; the approval of 4 new golf courses in the country (one can only assume tourists will be the majority benefactors), Obama lifting the telecoms embargo, and the relaxation of some visa restrictions. However, for the moment, this history is still very much part of reality, and accounts for much of what a foreigner finds fascinating here; food, rationing, censorship, tourist/Cuban relations… I could go on and I no doubt will…but perhaps another day.