Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (32 page)

Speaking in Spanish, with our tireless interpreter translating verbatim during pauses, Carmenate welcomed us to this seven-and-a-half-acre (three-hectare) market garden in the middle of Ciego de Ávila, a town in central Cuba that rarely sees any of the two million tourists who
visit the island annually. Central Cuba's abandoned, dilapidated, and crumbling sugarcane factories on the outskirts of its towns and the Soviet-style cinderblock architecture are not exactly postcard moments. But the Little Radish is one of Cuba's top-producing
organopónicos
, and Carmenate had a well-rehearsed presentation for the growing number of foreign visitors, like us, who were interested in Cuba's urban agriculture and unique food system. He knew exactly when to pause to let our translator chime in.

The Little Radish farm was near enough to the municipal baseball diamond that Carmenate often paused to patiently wait out the roar of the fans cheering the Saturday morning game. He smiled and admitted that as soon as he was finished showing us around his garden, he would be off to cheer on his hometown team. But for the time being, he was generous with his time and clearly proud to be showing off what he and his fellow farmers had created on a flat former expanse of asphalt.

“The public decides what we plant,” explained Carmenate, motioning toward raised beds dripping with fifty different vegetable crops that North American chefs would be falling all over themselves to get.
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The ubiquitous Soviet-style apartment blocks were the backdrop to picture-perfect Chinese cabbages, tomatoes, lettuces, cucumbers, and culinary herbs, while medicinal flowers grew in raised beds that ran in neat, even strips. Ingeniously recycled concrete curbs made lovely, straight, ankle-high edges for shallow beds. Curbs were stacked two high for deeper beds, and cinderblocks were stood on end for even higher rows where needed. An open irrigation ditch ran around the perimeter, and black irrigation tubing ran to each bed with a central sprinkler. In this case, water was pumped to a cistern that would be used to create water pressure.

This is a fairly typical farmer-owned and -operated cooperative. The thirteen farmers must produce forty-four pounds (twenty kilograms) of produce to supply local schools, hospitals, seniors’ homes, and daycare facilities as their “social contribution.”
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Any production above that goal
is sold, free market-style, at the farm's small kiosk at the entrance. The day's selections and prices are written in chalk on a board at the little hut that serves as the point of sale. Competition keeps quality high and prices low. There are thirty-one
organopónicos
in the city of only 136,000 residents. That's one urban market garden for every 4,387 people.
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“Farming is hard work; you need to live in the garden under the sun all day,” Carmenate continued, glancing at his thick, rough hands. “But the pay is very good and it's a very satisfying job.” José, another farmer-member standing next to Carmenate, nodded in agreement and then went back to working in a row of cucumbers. The year before, for example, the Little Radish sold 227,000 pesos of produce, leaving the co-op a profit of 97,000 pesos.
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Half of the profit, as always, was reinvested in infrastructure; the other half was split among the thirteen workers. The land is basically rent-free, courtesy of the state; Carmenate said that they pay one peso of rent per year; that is, twenty-four cents, to the government.

Farmers in Cuba are at the top tier of state salaries, above doctors and lawyers, though they are far from affluent by North American standards. The state provides incredible amounts of resources to farmers to help them farm most efficiently at the lowest cost but with the most productive result. The only official occupation that seems to pay more than farming in Cuba is a job in the lucrative tourism industry.

After the economic breakdown of the Little Radish's operations, Carmenate slid into an animated technical discourse on the intricate balance of intensive crop rotations. One crop was always producing, with two others at various growing stages ready to peak as soon as the producing crop was spent. Sunflowers stood at the end of each bed to attract pests away from the other plants, and marigolds were interspersed to control unwanted bugs for “companion planting” techniques. The neem tree was not only valuable as shade in the yard but its leaves were a valuable biopesticide when soaked, macerated, and then sprayed wherever needed. A compost bin of California red wigglers were busy eating through decaying plant matter and turning it into nutrient-rich loamy soil. Cuba's legacy of industrial plantation agriculture and deforestation left the island with considerable desertification and soil erosion that continues to this day. In the cities, soil must be created almost from scratch, and the California red worms are the cornerstone of producing nutrient-rich soil to constantly replace the fertility that is lost to intensive growing and the nature of weather in the tropics (heavy rains and hurricanes leech nutrients out of the soil and contribute to soil erosion.) Agroecology, the erudite term I heard over and over again from urban farmers, refers to a complex but effective interplay of crop rotation, intercropping, composting, vermiculture (composting with the help of worms), biopesticides, and soil management. Everything must contribute to the overall health of the garden. In that sense, the garden dictates what the farmers plant just as much as the customers do.

At the end of our tour—the baseball game sounding frenzied in the background—Carmenate and the other farmers gratefully accepted our seemingly odd tokens of appreciation for their time: bars of soap, disposable razors, pencils, pads of paper, deodorant, shampoo, and small household trinkets that will be shared among their families. It was a reminder that the Cuban urban-agriculture model was still a product of necessity, not an academic endeavor or a counterculture rebellion. It made me wonder how far the will to change back home would go in the presence of the same necessity and the token political support for anything but a cheap, abundant, and relatively accessible food system.

V
IVERO
A
LAMAR
, H
AVANA
(2010)

While the Little Radish is well off the tourist path, Vivero Alamar, in the Alamar district in the eastern part of Havana city (Havana is the name of both a province and its capital city) has become a bit of a tourist attraction. It's Havana's largest and most successful
organopónico
, and now curious foreigners are commonly bused in for garden tours.

Alamar is a Soviet-era planned community in eastern Havana. The land where the
organopónico
now operates was supposed to hold a sports complex and a hospital, but it became an
organopónico
for the community in 1997. Vivero Alamar (Alamar Plant Nursery) is now a 27-acre (11-hectare) urban farm, with 143 farm workers as cooperative owners.
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On the day that I visited, it looked as if the entire farm had been spiffed up and staged for our group's arrival, right down to the team of oxen dragging a plow up and down rows that presumably were being readied to plant. Another team of oxen brought home a harvest of what looked like king grass, a very tall tropical grass used as livestock feed in Cuba.

Vivero Alamar specializes in vegetables and salad crops, so we saw perfect, neat rows growing in the adobe-red dirt. There wasn't a weed in sight. The farm also specializes in what are known in Cuba as medicinal plants but what we tend to think of as just culinary herbs like mint, basil, cilantro, oregano, and the like. The farmers even grow certain plants for religious ceremonies. And the incredible, perfect produce is sold to the community at the very busy farm-gate kiosks. Vivero Alamar had enough money even to invest in black crop screens to protect most of the rows where the more delicate crops, like lettuce, grow from too much sun and heat.

Vivero Alamar, like the Little Radish, is a cooperative, which means the work is shared and so are the profits. Farmers work their way up the pay scale at Alamar, the farm's assistant manager explained to our group. You start at the bottom with some of the harder jobs, but if you stick it out, and the other farmers like you (and vote to keep you around), then you move up from a level-one farmer, all the way up to a level-five farmer. At the top levels, a farmer at Vivero Alamar will earn about $500
a year, almost twice what a white-collar job in Cuba pays, and certainly more than the $10 per month minimum-wage job pays out.

Rations

Food rationing is still the bitter reality of food scarcity in Cuba today, though there is talk that food rations may soon end if supplies can cope with an open-market system.

When I asked Cubans what items they get as part of their monthly food rations, they rattled them off so quickly that I was forced to ask several people to cobble together a reasonable list. Every Cuban can buy—at a very low price, even for them—a half-pound of cooking oil, seven pounds of rice, eight ounces of coffee, one pound of chicken, ten eggs, four pounds of sugar, twenty ounces of dried beans, one package of dried pasta, and eleven ounces of fish (which generally was not available for some reason, so chicken was substituted). Children under thirteen years of age are eligible for one pound of ground beef; children under seven get 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of powdered milk every ten days; children between the ages of seven and thirteen receive soy yogurt rations rather than powdered milk.
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