Insights from Jessie: Cuba
Insights from Jessie : Cuba
By the time I was eighteen I had probably only been to the city three times, and my exposure to other cultures and languages was limited to the honey soy chicken at the iconic Chinese restaurant in the small rural Australian town I grew up in. So at twenty three, after completing an undergraduate degree in Biotechnology, I set off with a one way ticket to discover the world. I felt my degree was pretty awesome in terms of science, but rather unsatisfying in terms of impact and I was determined to uncover more.
I have always had an interest in innovation and technology transfer, and trying to understand how to move the needle on sustainability. This interest fueled my desire to travel, eventually leading me to the other side of the world where I stumbled across a conference on Urban and Sustainable Agriculture in Cuba.
Attending this conference was part of a larger quest to learn what was happening around the world in regards to sustainability and to develop my understanding of how that knowledge and application could be brought back to Australia. I was hungry for direction of what to do with my life, and where to apply the portion of our days we carve out for ‘work’. I also wanted to push my exposure to experiences, cultures, people, places and ways of being in the world.
In what turned into a two year adventure, the place that had the most impact on me was Cuba and the conference I attended there. The conference took us across the country visiting examples of urban and sustainable Agriculture. Highly curated, considering the political climate in Cuba, and rich in cultural, educational and agricultural experience.
Cuba and Cuban’s are incredibly passionate about sustainable agriculture, largely driven by necessity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the oil for sugar program in the early 90sCuban’s quickly had to adjust from the tradition of producing mainly sugar for export and instead solve for producing enough food to feed the local population. Necessity forced the majority to do the best they could with all available resources.
I was exposed to some very cool practice change while in Cuba, like the large-scale production and usage of microbial inoculants, which are now becoming increasingly popular fifteen years later, but my time there was most impactful for another reason. The necessity for practice change wasn’t black and white. It was complicated, it was about people, access to land, political systems, global pressures, a need to feed the local community. All of which culminated to create true necessity, which forced very rapid change.
With all this being said, there are a few key takeaways from my time in Cuba that I still carry with me today.
Practice change comes from necessity
Left to their own devices, farmers are mighty problem solvers and natural steward
Sustainable movements based on ideology alone, are often much more nuanced than they appear on face value, especially when they encompass complex systems of nature and social systems
