The good life in Havana: Cuba's green (organic) revolution [View All]

[Karmadillo]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1217550.ece

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Almost five decades after the now ailing Fidel Castro and his comrades overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista and seized power in Cuba, another revolution, largely unnoticed by most visitors and tourists, is well underway on this Caribbean island. And Mr Salcines and his small urban farm at Alamar, an eastern suburb of the capital, Havana, are at the centre of a social transformation that may turn out to be as important as anything else that has been achieved during Castro's 47 years in power.

Spurred into action by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous impact this had on its subsidised economy, the government of Cuba was forced to take radical steps to feed its people. The solution it chose - essentially unprecedented both within the developed and undeveloped world - was to establish a self-sustaining system of agriculture that by necessity was essentially organic.

Laura Enriquez, a sociologist at the University of California Berkeley, who has written extensively on the subject of Latin American agriculture, said: "What happened in Cuba was remarkable. It was remarkable that they decided to prioritise food production. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option and exported 'what they were good at' and imported food. The Cubans went for food security and part of that was prioritising small farmers."

Cuba is filled with more than 7,000 urban allotments or "organoponicos", which fill perhaps as many as 81,000 acres. They have been established on tiny plots of land in the centre of tower-block estates or between the crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. One afternoon I visited a small garden of tomatoes and spinach that had been dug just a few hundred yards from the Plaza de la Revolution, a vast concrete square where Castro and his senior regime members annually oversee Cuba's May Day parade. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90 per cent of their fruit and vegetables.

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Remarkably, this organic revolution has worked. Annual calorie intake now stands at about 2,600 a day, while UNFAO estimates that the percentage of the population considered undernourished fell from 8 per cent in 1990-2 to about 3 per cent in 2000-2. Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than that of the US, while at 77 years life expectancy is the same.

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