Dave's World O' Wonders
Dave's painfully slow recounting of a trip to Cuba. (To follow the story you have to work from the bottom up)Monday, August 14, 2006
Las Yagrumas
Okay back to the Travel. As I mentioned this was an eco-tour of Cuba so we left Havana airport and went out immediately of the city and into the countryside. If memory serves, our first stop, "Las Yagrumas," is about 45 minutes out of town. As you can see, it's a typical "all inclusive." resort on the edge of San Antonio De Los Baños. Nothing particularly special about the place although it was close to the caves and formations we saw the next day. It was fairly down at the heels and many of the rooms had problems with showers and such.
Cuban all inclusives are popular with Canadians as a low cost tropical getaway. Three of the hotel rooms you can see in this photo belonged to retired Canadian couples who travel to this same resort every year for the winter. I'm sure that they were paying far less than what it would cost for an RV park in Florida. With free food, drinks for a buck or two and pleasant February weather, you could do a lot worse.
Like all places in Cuba however, the infrastructure was in some disrepair. our room had hot water (not all did), but the shower was non-functional. I'm sure it remained broken not out of neglect, but rather that no replacement parts were available. I believe that hotel staff would cannibalize parts from some rooms to make others more functional. When 20 couples showed up as we did, they were out of tricks. At any rate, it was far more pleasant than some of the facilities I'd used in the Navy, so I squatted to shower and moved on.
View of the Mogotes
Our first day of sightseeing took us to the site of a prehistoric sea. These narrow haystack shaped hills were islands for millions of years and the seawater eroded the limestone below the surface into the honeycombed format that you see. Only Vietnam has similar hills. As the sea receded, the flat land retained much of the nutrients and we saw that it was mostly farmed. In the very first photo, you can see another view from this same vista behind Barb and I.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Some of Those Cows
Sorry, this is not a good shot to show off the neck thingy, trust me, it was there.
Cuban Farming Part 2: Terraponics and the Urban Farmhand
Another aspect of the Cuban farming revolution was the need to move food production closer to the people. I'm jumping ahead a bit in our trip but this is a food producing field in the middle of Havana. Probably an old soccer or sports field, it has been converted for what the Cubans call "Terraponics."
Forgive the blurry image (taken from the bus), but these are football field length cement planters with walkways in between. As you can guess, growing crops here is 100% manual. Workers work their way up and down each row, weeding, painting leaves with soapy water (cheaper than pesticide), and other necessary tasks (the planters are about 3 feet tall so it doesn't totally kill your back). Crops were handed out at a stand built at one end of the field.
Now that I think it through, I can imagine that the calories expended to tend these fields are probably less than than the the calories produced. I can also imagine what it may be like in Cuba to become a farmhand. Do people volunteer for this work? Is it compulsory? I did hear that all young adults are drafted into the military and that some of them are assigned farm work for their 2 years.
If you're interested in intensive manual agriculture like this, I recommend the book "Square Foot Gardening," which is probably in your library.
Cuban Farming
The picture above sums up the most extraordinary aspect of Cuban life today, the return to non-petroleum based agriculture. As to why I find this so amazing and important, I'm going to have to give some historical background.
I know, you're here for the travel bug stuff, but trust me this is good. Some of the stuff I'm writing here I remember from discussions with our guides, the rest came from a Harpers Magazine article from March of 2005 entitled "What will you be eating when the revolution comes?" Well worth tracking down if you want to know more.
Cuba in the 1980's: Despite the US blockade, agriculture in Cuba looks like North American agriculture. Lots of tractors (Russian), cattle (Canadian) and, thanks to Soviet overproduction, lots of petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers. Massive subsidies from the Soviets and sympathetic countries around the world allow Cuba to feed itself just like everyone else.
Cuba 1992: Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union set in motion the collapse of Cuban agriculture. No more cheap fuel for tractors. No more petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers. Production plummets. The average Cuban adult male goes from 3000 Calories per day to 1900. There isn't enough grain to feed the cattle so they are slaughtered and eaten. Cubans today refer to the early and mid 1990's as "The Special Period." As the deprivation became severe, the number of people fleeing to the US skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, Cuban agronomists had been thinking about farming differently for some time. The amount of calories in fuel, pesticides, fertilizer and transportation consumed in food production always exceeded the yield.
The solution was to revert back to older food production solutions. We drove past several hundred farms in all our travels that week and never saw a working tractor in the field. Farming is manual labour. Gone were the North American cattle. In their place were the cows typical in India and Latin America, the kind with the long fold of skin hanging below their necks. They (like the oxen above) feed themselves from the grasses on the sides of the roads. Chickens run free and subsist on bugs and weeds.
The Cuban diet is back up to 3000 calories a day. I saw bags of rice from Vietnam at one of the ration stores but just about all the other food I saw was raised on the island itself.
Since North American agriculture is as dependant on plentiful, cheap oil as the old Cuban system was, I wonder sometimes if I saw a glimpse of our future on those fields.
Barb and Dave's Cuban Adventure
Hello and welcome to our Cuban vacation blog: An 18 month retrospective.
The photo above is of Barb and I on our first day. The mountains in the background are geologically unique and I'll write a bit about that later. This was a tour created to show the unique geology and ecology of Cuba. Barb went on the tour because she had enjoyed her previous trip to Cuba with this same tour company. I went along, not because I'm an ecology guy, but because I have always wanted to understand what life was like there. The US mythology around Cuba (both the official spin and the counter spin) is so pervasive that I couldn't tell the truth without being there myself. And so, at the reunion of Barb's previous tour group, they asked for a show of hands of who wanted to go in February of 2005 and mine went up.
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