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  • From: Scott Vlaun <scott@moosepondarts.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Re: big ag in Pc/Cuba
  • Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 00:01:49 -0400

I was lucky enough to get to Cuba in '97 with a group from Food First. We too were on a guided trip, although pretty loosely guided at times, but we did get to see a lot of organic farms and community gardens. What they had done was truly amazing. It seemed like every piece of available land around Havana was producing food. They were very hip to permaculture as well and we had no problem giving away a pile of permaculture books translated into Spanish.

As a culture, the Cubans are highly educated, especially for that part of the world. Faced with famine, they quickly developed all sorts of sustainable systems from rotational grazing schemes using horses and citrus, to building over a thousand beneficial insect laboratories all over the country. While some of the folks we met in the field were pretty open about the fact that they'd rather be in an air conditioned office, for the most part they seemed pretty proud of what they'd accomplished as well as the fact that the world was coming to them, to learn from what they'd developed. I'm hoping to get back there soon.

I'd highly recommend the trip.

Scott Vlaun
Western Maine USA

On Monday, September 2, 2002, at 02:09 PM, Charles Knoles wrote:


Just curious, conoces a Cuba? are you speaking first hand here or is it
grass is always greener? I'm about ready to averiguar for myself, I hear
such conflicting reports about Cuba. Maybe I can do it while the ol' man
is
still alive...
-Rick

Haven't been myself but my buddy Francis who runs an organic dairy here
went over as part of a USDA funded research trip looking into large scale
organic conversion (a hopeful thing in and of itself methinks). He was very
impressed with what he saw there. He cautioned that his trip was guided
though so you never know.....

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