Cuba is forging a surprising future as the eco-capital of the Caribbean , with booming organic urban agriculture, and dynamic environmental education projects, writes Paddy Woodworth
Santa Clara, in central Cuba, is best known as the City of the Heroic Guerrilla. Ernesto "Che" Guevara's remains rest here, in a moving little memorial chamber, dwarfed by the stern concrete monument above it. This small university town was the site of a decisive military victory in the revolution which brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959, and it still seems to regard him with warm affection. But Santa Clara is now distinguished for another reason: it has become the fruit-and-vegetable capital of the island, and, arguably, of the whole Caribbean.
Sometimes Che and the local products are part of the same stir-fry, and that doesn't always make for a great mix. "Be more efficient every day. Be better every day," the great revolutionary exhorts all who enter the Tamarindo fruit-tree nursery from a freshly painted propaganda pillar. The wicked glint in Che's eye in his iconic photographs suggests that he must have been a fun guy to drink a mojito with; some of his quotations suggest one would have had more craic with an earnest Victorian vicar.
Both sides of Che, however, would probably be delighted with the extraordinary success of Cuba's organopónico revolution, in which Santa Clara has led the way. The word, coined in Cuba, seems to derive from hydroponics, the art of growing plants without soil, but is in fact based on the richest hummus you could imagine. This remarkable market garden movement has become a beacon to international advocates of urban organic agriculture. Even Bill McKibben, author of the eco-doom bestseller The End of Nature, has found some ground for optimism among the flourishing carrots, guavas, avocados and radishes springing up in former waste lots in every Cuban city, and town, in almost every village. And for those who still look for flames in the embers of a revolution dampened down by authoritarian dogma, the economic distortions created by international tourism, and, above all, by the crippling pressure of the US economic blockade, the organopónicos offer echoes of the first fine rapture of the 1960s.
Cuba, beyond the tourist beaches and bars, often seems a run-down place, where production is slow and slip-shod, where incentives to work hard and innovate are lacking, where things simply do not work and a dull resentment pervades the atmosphere, despite the charm and generosity of many individual Cubans. Whether the resentment is primarily a response against Castro's one-party state - Amnesty International describes restrictions on human rights as "severe" - or against the misery inflicted by the gringo blockade, is hard to gauge on a short visit. No one shares their inner feelings too freely in a society which still imprisons people for their opinions.
A DIFFERENT WORLD, WHERE EVERYTHING STILL SEEMS POSSIBLE
In any case, to visit Los Mineros organopónico in Santa Clara is to step into a different and better world, like shifting step from a dull forced march to a vibrant salsa.
Orlando Caballero Martínez and his wife María Luisa Jiménez run the garden, which enjoys the status of referencia nacional - a model for the nation - with infectious energy and evident pleasure. Orlando was a soldier in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, and is proud of it. He enjoys pointing out that the man now shaking the earth from a fat bunch of radishes was a colonel in the same outfit. His wide-open grin and arm-squeezing welcome recall the days when Che's guerrillas rode into Santa Clara on horse-back to a generally rapturous reception, and everything seemed possible.
A slogan on the improvised water tower behind Orlando warns that "to do nothing, or to do less than one is able, is to be counter-revolutionary" (Che, again). The soldier-turned-gardener does not fall into that category.
Within two minutes he has us down on our knees, up close and personal with a mass of earthworms, whose seething movements have created a new kind of revolution. They are the humble architects of the wealth of vegetables sprouting in the immaculate raised beds which make up most of Los Mineros.
Worm-processed compost (lumbriculture) has been one of the keys to the success of the organopónicos. The species selected - California reds is their unlikely common name - turns waste matter into natural fertiliser extraordinarily well and extraordinarily fast. The soil in the raised beds is thus exceptionally rich.
Almost all pest control is also done by organic means. Orlando uses marigolds as a deterrent. The Tamarindo fruit nursery uses a dwarf breed of hen, which pecks away at nuisance insects with ruthless gusto.
Every organopónico seems to have its own special trick, whether using old cosmetics bottles to protect labels from the elements, or an ingenious system for keeping training lines taut for tomatoes, or even - recorded by McKibben - pyramidal greenhouses to "focus energy".
Since the raised beds are so obviously productive, I wonder, why is about a fifth of Los Mineros given over to level bed production? Orlando's answer is shockingly simple: they cannot find enough scrap bricks, or old railway sleepers, to make more beds. Later, I came across a grim consequence of this shortage of the most basic goods in today's Cuba. A small organopónico tended by schoolchildren to provide nutritious meals had created raised beds using the only material to hand: corrugated asbestos.
Up at street level at Los Mineros, María Luisa is selling the garden's produce to a steady trickle of evidently satisfied customers from the barrio. Her marriage to Orlando has lasted 40 years ("still going strong", I am assured happily by both of them). Onions, spinach, Swiss chard, tomatoes, radishes and herbs are set out on her small stall. They come in robust sizes and mouth-watering colours, at variable prices to which the state sets an upper limit. Orlando whispers to me that they sell below their own prices to people who they know can't afford them.
The organopónicos were born out of necessity, in modern Cuba's hungriest hour, when lucky people ate two meals a day and others subsisted on sugar and water. The fall of the Soviet Union and its allies in the late 1980s deprived Havana of a generous market for its sugar and a source of cheap imports, especially oil, as well as nitrate fertilisers. The Clinton administration then tightened the screws on the US blockade, in place since the early 1960s. This policy, much harsher than any boycott ever imposed on apartheid South Africa, is regarded as illegal by several international bodies, and also isolates Cuba from Washington's Latin American trading partners. Cuba faced starvation and collapse in this grim new era, euphemistically named the "Special Period in Time of Peace".
Organic gardening on a massive scale proved a key factor in keeping the Cubans on their feet. According to Bill McKibben, no fan of Castro's, the country has "created what may be the world's largest model of semi-sustainable agriculture, one that relies far less than the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth". Last year, Havana alone grew 300,000 tons of food, "nearly its entire vegetable supply, and more than a token amount of rice and meat". Rabbits, chickens, sheep, pigs, and even fish, can be found in some urban market gardens.
The organopónicos pay their workers well, too, a crucial point in maintaining their output as Cuba has again become more prosperous. Opening the doors to mass tourism was the major element in Cuba's current economic revival. This renewed (but very relative) prosperity, however, has come at a high price in terms of twisting rewards for labour right out of shape. A waiter or a taxi-driver can now easily earn more in tips in a single day than a doctor can earn in a month. Only the most dedicated professionals can resist that kind of temptation, and the brain-drain towards the resorts is frightening.
As a worker at an organopónico, however, you can earn, with the help of a generous profit-sharing scheme, twice as much as a middle-ranking civil servant. The movement is also closely tied into Cuba's still excellent educational and health services, which are Castro's greatest achievements and the envy of most developing (and some developed) countries. Each market garden is linked to a kindergarten, hospital, or old people's home, and must supply fresh food directly at rock-bottom prices before calculating its profits.
Most organopónicos are state-owned, but very small ones may be private. Yvonne Otero Cruz has packed the patio of her substantial colonial-style house in Santa Clara with exotic plants for interior decoration. She also creates a marvellous variety of decorations from dried flowers in a cramped attic. The very existence of any market for her products underlines the fact that happier days have returned to the town. The state has honoured her with recognition as a model producer at national level, but strict restrictions on entrepreneurship mean that most of her sales happen in her own handsome hallway. Her aged grandfather sits here in a rocking chair, reading his Bible, happily oblivious to a visit from local dignitaries, a foreign scientist and this reporter.
The Marianas organopónico is at the other extreme from Yvonne's patio, employing 50 workers in small teams, each responsible for about 90 of the centre's 532 raised beds, or for its extensive fruit plantations and compost facility, whose produce is distributed to local farms. The entire site had to be cleared, by machete, of marabú, a thorny alien invasive plant from Africa which infests a disturbingly large proportion of the island.
The director of Las Marianas, Mirella Reyes, walks me proudly through yet another piece of waste ground converted to nutritious production. "I think of these plants as good Cubans," she says, laughing as she indicates a row of aubergines. "They saved us during the Special Period. And I'll tell you something else: the Special Period made us all vegetarians, for the first time."
Cubans still like their meat, of course, when they can get it, but they enjoy a supply of cheap organic fruit-and-veg that many Westerners might envy. There is an odd little mystery, though: the paladares, the private houses permitted to set up small restaurants, buy avidly at the organopónicos for their clients. But vegetables remain scarce and stingy at the (mostly rather grotty) state-run tourist restaurants. In the vegetable capital of Cuba, I ordered vegetables with my smoked pork at the stately but sad 1878 eating house. I got only a spoonful of yesterday's lettuce, shredded, shrivelled, and miserably undressed.
Leaving town by car the next day, I got a yearning for fresh tomatoes and headed back to Los Mineros. María Luisa said they had just sold out, but directed me to a private organopónico next door. I was greeted warmly there, but the owner wanted to give away a bagful, rather than accept payment in tourist (convertible) pesos, the only currency I was carrying, which are worth roughly 25 times more than local pesos. He eventually accepted, most reluctantly, the smallest coin I had.
Heading back up the street, I found myself pursued by Orlando, who had spotted me from his radish bed. He could not let me leave Los Mineros without a memento, he insisted, pressing a fat bunch of chard into my hands, and one of his own hand-rolled cigars into my breast pocket.
A COMANDANTE WITH AN ECOLOGICAL AGENDA
Organic gardening is by no means Cuba's only claim to being the green jewel in the crown of the Caribbean. On most other islands environmental degradation is rampant and increasing. Even the Washington-published Smithsonian magazine recognises that Castro presides over the most conservation-conscious island in the region. This is, of course, partly due to the Special Period, which deprived the country of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. But Castro's inner circle had always included one man with an environmental agenda, Comandante Guillermo Garcia Frías, once an illiterate peasant who saved Castro's and Guevara's lives in the early days of the Revolution. Later appointed to the Central Committee, he argued for higher conservation standards than were typical of Marxist-Leninist economies. As a result, the country boasts some fine national parks and protected areas. Many of its precious endemic species - those which exist nowhere else in the world - have surprisingly healthy populations. The tiny Cuban Tody, for example, a noisy bird the size and shape of a green, red, grey and violet golfball, can be heard and seen close-up in woods across the length and breadth of the island.
The Comandante was, briefly, a surprise guest at the second Iberian-Latin-American Symposium on Ecological Restoration, which took place in Santa Clara last month. His presence was not only a rare honour, it was also an indication that Cuba is ready to make a significant move forward. Ecological restoration is a paradigm shift from simply conserving what remains of its wilderness areas toward the trickier but ultimately very rewarding prospect of rebuilding ecosystems which have suffered severe damage or degradation.
Jesús Matos Mederos, who co-founded the Cuban Group of Ecological Restoration in 2002, believes that Cuba has made great efforts to develop restoration in a short period, despite the chronic lack of resources for an enterprise that requires generous investments of money and time.
The conference heard fascinating stories from other lands:
• how Colombian ecologists are restoring plants attractive to bees in areas devastated by coca and coffee monocultures - and disputed by the army and FARC guerrillas - so that local peasants can produce and export honey instead of cocaine;
• how a movement for the "restoration of natural capital" is finding common ground between ecology and economics;
• a message from the few remaining Lacondona Maya people about restoring subtropical forests while rotating sweetcorn cultivation;
• how to rebuild the Delaware estuary for nature, recreation and industry;
• how thousands of hectares of fire-prone forestry plantations in Andalusia are being returned to the kind of productive savannah landscape a medieval cattle farmer would have recognised.
HOW A RARE CACTUS CHANGED A COMMUNITY
But one of the most remarkable stories at the conference came from much closer to Santa Clara, though it does not - yet - concern restoration, properly speaking. Twenty kilometres from the town, on a vertiginous slope prone to landslips, a cactus unique to the area clings to continued existence in the wild only by a handful of tenacious roots. A few years ago, only three specimens of Melocactus actinacanthus were known to survive here. Since its identification in 1976, collectors for the illegal international trade in exotic plants have steadily undermined an always tiny population. Someone somewhere in Ireland quite possibly has one as a centre-piece on their dining table. But before guilt seizes you by the throat, remember that there are many similar varieties of Melocactus, generally globular, green and very spiky. Some, as in the case of actinacanthus, have a velvety looking reddish bonnet on top.
Collectors are not the only threat to the cacti. Matos and his colleagues rejoiced recently when they found a further colony of 14 plants, near the carefully guarded threesome. Just months later, a landslip swept away more than half the second colony, and the world population plummeted towards extinction again. At present, the Cubans are experimenting with growing the cactus from seed, with great difficulty, but hope to begin restoring individuals from botanical gardens to their original home in the next few years.
Nigel Taylor at Kew gardens in London, who is assisting the project, argues that actinacanthus is not a species in its own right, but a large version of another rare Cuban endemic, the dwarf Turk's Cap cactus, Melocactus matanzanus. Matos contests this, but both agree that actinacanthus is worthy of urgent conservation measures. Unsurprisingly, none of the subsistence farmers in the nearby isolated settlement of Revacadero had even heard of the cactus. They had more pressing concerns, such as survival. But Jesús Matos, a man whose quiet manner hides massive determination, saw an opportunity to use the cactus as the spearhead of an environmental education campaign in the area, officially a protected zone since 1980. This campaign might not only save the plant but also halt chronic erosion, extirpate alien invaders such as marabú, and perhaps even achieve reforestation with native vegetation.
Matos needed a local ally and he found a gem in Arlén Izquierdo, a woman with long dark hair, strikingly clear blue eyes, and an irrepressible belief that, in Castro's ubiquitous slogan, "a better world is possible", though I never heard her quote it. Che Guevara used to dream about building true communism in Cuba with "the New Man", free of selfish impulses and dedicated to his fellow human beings. After meeting Arlén, you feel he should have started with the women.
She was the local teacher and doubled as the village hairdresser. She knows everyone, and everyone knows her. Though her enthusiasm had already her earned the nickname of la loca [the mad one], this was a kind of compliment in a village where, as one resident told me, "everything was dead here until Arlén started the cactus campaign". She eagerly accepted Matos's offer of a new job which stretched her in many ways. Her point of departure was the children. She started a "Save the Melocactus" campaign in local schools. Today, the first thing you notice on arrival is that almost every fence is hung with a little cardboard placard, colourfully telling residents that "the forests are refuges for animals", or that "Trees = Life".
Her weekly meetings with the children became immensely popular. "They are always combined with games," she says, "or with excursions to the river near where the cactus grows, with bathing." None of the children had ever before thought of their environment as anything other than a source of food. They began to see the countryside outside their doors as magical, but endangered by overgrazing, uncontrolled burning, and invasive alien species. They have now produced no less than seven little plays, scripted by Arlén. The plots show great pride that their village has something unique to protect, such as the cactus. But they also show a bigger picture, as when a nurse comes on stage, carrying a sick patient - our entire planet.
The adults in Revacadero began to get the message. It is hard not to, when the only chemist's shop and only grocery store in the area are festooned with the children's exuberant paintings and posters. Interestingly, much of the medicine in the chemist's is herbal. The Special Period sparked a massive revival in folk remedies. There are, of course, the usual Cuban contradictions - the paint the children use, for example, has a very high mercury content, because nothing else is available or affordable.
Now Arlén has every age group in the area involved, including pensioners. She insists that there is no political or religious exclusion at her meetings. "I knew one woman who didn't attend was a Jehovah's Witness. I asked her if she believed that nature was God's creation. She said she did, so I asked her to help protect it, and she is now one of our foremost supporters." Another elderly woman creates delightful ornaments from local dried flowers - clearly a growth area in Cuba. The little nursery in Arlén's improvised greenhouse, originally intended only to germinate the cactus from seed, now produces everything from avocado to lemon seedlings for the entire community.
The adult meetings discuss practical issues, from minimising erosion (plough across a hillside, not up and down it) to controlling the use of fire. But again, entertainment content is paramount. "I'm happy if there is five minutes' debate for every 20 minutes' dancing," she says blithely.
There is no more typically Cuban solution to Cuban problems than to start up the music. She searches the national and UN calendar for reasons to party - International Wetlands Day (February 2nd) and the Day of Cuban Science (January 15th) are now celebrated in a village which had very little to celebrate before. Environmental education has become entwined with a revival of community life in general.
Word spread rapidly of the programme's success. But when Arlén received a summons to meet a senior figure in the local administration, she ignored it, half fearing she had committed some infraction. A police escort followed up the message, and she learned she was to take her campaign to neighbouring settlements in the 7,000 hectare Santa Clara Savannah Protected Area. To reach some of them, she had to learn to ride a horse. To a woman who, with her husband Ernesto, built her own house, produces her own mango, papaya, pineapple and banana, makes her own popcorn, butter and cheese, and salt pork from her own pigs, this was all in a day's work.
After watching a special performance from the children, Arlén, Ernesto, Jesús Matos and Alberto Torres, curator of the Santa Clara Herbarium, lead me into the broiling midday sun and up the hills above the river. No one else is moving, but Cuban Todys repeatedly serenade our passing. A metre-long green and blue lizard surveys us from a nearby tree. Turkey vultures patrol every ridge, the brilliant light transforming their usually black plumage to rich chocolate brown.
We finally reach a path where we walk level with the vultures' elegantly extended wingtips. The spiky vegetation demands a change to long-sleeved shirts despite the blistering heat. We are close to the slope where the remaining wild specimens of Melocactus actinacanthus have been found. The small but catastrophic landslip which buried half the last colony is visible.
Suddenly, Alberto pauses, staring at a mass of thorny undergrowth right on the path. The midday sun has caught a faint red glow beneath the dense brown vegetation. He lifts the thorns gingerly. It is a small but perfectly formed Melocactus actinacanthus. The known population of the cactus in the wild has just abruptly increased by about 10 per cent. The other cacti, carefully labelled, are scattered on the hard-to-access slope below us. So close to human footfall, the survival of the newly found plant is clearly even more tenuous than usual. But its serendipitous discovery crowns a day in which pessimism, for once, seems utterly out of place.
Paddy Woodworth's new travel book, The Basque Country, will be published by Signal and Oxford in September