permaculture

[Scott Vlaun <scott@moosepondarts.com>]

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.....
>
> _______________________________________________
> permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture