CUBA: NEW VISTAS A short history of the future ( of humankind )

To lea [at] eListas.net, elan [at] csf.colorado.edu
Subject [LEA-Venezuela] NEW VISTAS A short history of the future

Cuba no usa pesticidas, ni agroquimicos, ni modelos agro-indutriales, y con
esto se demuestra que hay una version de agricultura en un pais que es
realmente sostenible, ni U.S.A. ni la antigua U.R.S.S. ni ahora Rusia usan
modelos agricolas asi que desafian todas las teorias del "desarrollo
mundial" en boga, del "desarrollo" ese donde se gasta nuestra madre la
tierra para hacer unas cuantas personas muy millonarias.
Trastor
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http//http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=11305
NEW VISTAS
A short history of the future
By JEREMY SEABROOK
SIXTY per cent of the vegetables consumed in Cuba today are organically
grown in city gardens. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Cuba
was denied the access to pesticides, fertiliser and tractor fuel on which
it had depended. This, together with the continuing trade embargo by the
USA, ought to have ensured the collapse of the regime.
That it didn’t is a tribute to the ingenuity and creativity of people who
have lived for almost half a century in a state of siege. In place of
industrialised agriculture, Cuba has developed a low-input sustainable
system. In the countryside organic sugar, coffee and orange farms have been
established; but the real triumph has been Cuba’s ability to mobilise
popular support for turning unused city land into small vegetable plots.
There are now more than 60,000 huertos, or gardens, growing food in Havana
alone. People have drawn on their memories of childhood in the countryside
to revive old skills and enthusiasms, and the people of Cuba, despite their
poverty, now enjoy one of the healthiest diets in the world.
This encapsulates a whole era of social and economic history. All over the
world, subsistence farmers have been forced, either to leave the land, or
to intensify agricultural productivity by means of industrial inputs. This
was true of both the socialist and capitalist models of society. The
collapse of ‘‘development’’ in Cuba demonstrates to the world that
disengagement from the global system does not necessarily lead to the
breakdown, disorder and violence which its defenders fear. It seems that
self-reliance has not, after all, been lost. It can be recuperated, and in
the most surprising ways. Indeed, what has happened in Cuba is the history
of the future.
When Cuba was compelled to de-link itself from a moribund socialism, it
could not, as occurred almost everywhere else in the world, enter into the
global capitalist fold ­ a ‘‘punishment’’ which was turned into an
opportunity. It had to find its own pathway to self-reliance. And this
makes it an even bigger threat to the only industrial system remaining, for
it shows that there is indeed an alternative, and it is to be found,
neither in learned theories nor in advanced market societies, but in the
neglected resources of home.
Cuba strips bare the whole paradigm of development into which the vast
majority of the world has now been compelled. The destruction of
self-reliance, the ruin of subsistence and self-sufficiency have been at
the heart of industrial development for more than 200 years. The peoples of
the world have been systematically made poor by their detachment from the
resource-base, in order that industrial society might offer them the
opportunity to become, neither secure nor sufficient, but rich. Only when
the earth has been stripped of much of its wealth, the forests, earth, soil
and water used up, polluted or poisoned, does it become clear that money
cannot restore the spoiled biosphere, and that wealth has a deeper meaning
than mere currency. Cuba shows that human resourcefulness is one of the
earth’s great treasures; when these are allied to a sustainable
agriculture, the wounds to the planet may, perhaps, yet be healed.
People have been leaving the land for two centuries the growers of the
world’s sustenance continue to be dispossessed in the name of efficiency,
large-scale agri-business, intensive agriculture, and now, genetically
modified food. Small farmers have been cheated and abused, are losing land
and livelihood at an increasing rate. In Bangladesh, the number of landless
people at the time of Independence was about 30 per cent. It is now 67 per
cent.
This process, of emptying the countryside took place a long time ago in
Britain, although it happened more recently in other European countries.
The rural poor in Britain were denied access to common land by enclosures,
prohibited to graze their animals, gather firewood, take the wild fruits or
animals of the forest to eke out their diet in times of hardship. Village
people grew vegetables in their garden, kept a pig, which they killed in
the autumn and salted down for the winter, and knew where to find herbs and
plants as medicine for familiar ailments — all this lingered in folk-memory
into the industrial era. Vestiges still remain in the devotion of urban
people to allotments, small parcels of land where they grow potatoes,
onions, carrots, beans ­ the last echoes of a decayed subsistence culture.
It is this form of impoverishment that country people today are trying to
resist; and Cuba has, unexpectedly, shown that even when industrialism
seems to have crushed sustainability, this can still be retrieved.
Industrial society not only disciplines the peasantry to the harsh rhythms
of manufacture and the supreme importance of the balance-sheet, it also
robs them of the capacity to be self-provisioning. People must learn to
depend, not on the resource-base, but on the market ­ which means money.
This lesson was, for a long time, rejected by many artisans in Britain the
handloom weavers retained some control over their hours of work into the
19th century, and their labour at the loom was supplemented by looking
after animals, collecting fuel, milking the cow, growing food. As the
factory system grew, the rewards for their labour declined, and they were
starved into the factories. The people of industrial society had to forget
that they ever could make and do things for themselves and for each other,
and came to buy in more and more of their needs in the market.
Self-reliance is scorned by the ideologues of industrialism as a form of
primitiveness, as autarchy, as impoverishment; in its place, they offer
market-dependency. And they call it freedom.
The forces that drove the people of Europe and America from the land are
now at work globally. The most passionate resistance comes from indigenous
peoples, who traditionally found all their needs answered within their own
locality ­ fishing communities, assured of food from seas and rivers;
forest people who understood the rich storehouse of ancient jungles; people
who knew where to find food, fodder, fibre, and how to renew the soils and
replenish the natural growth which they sustained, and which, in turn,
sustained them. Most environments also contained foods which people had
recourse to when harvests failed ­ tubers and roots, wild vegetables and
fruits. With the clearance of land and felling of forests, even these
hoarded, husbanded resources cease to exist.
The compulsions of globalism are presented as irreversible. Nothing makes
the apostles of an industrialism without end more angry than respect for
the past even the suggestion that it has anything to teach us is
castigated as nostalgia, impossible, backward-looking, a romantic hankering
after a vanished and mythic world. Anyone who speaks of salvaging even a
portion of the wisdom of the past is accused of being a ‘‘Luddite’’, an
impediment to progress. Yet they, too, speak of sustainability, although
they do everything within their considerable power to destroy it, wherever
it remains.
This is why the survival of Cuba is an important lesson to the world. The
transition to self-reliance has been peaceable, without fanfare. It has
taken place despite the silence of the media, and the switching off of the
engines of global publicity. But there it is. It has happened. It is not
theory, expensive know-how or expertise that has taught the people of Cuba
how to manage without the paraphernalia of industrial dependency ­ it is
the practice of necessity.
What a contrast this presents to the USA, which has just gone to war to
seize the resources that will maintain its economic supremacy. The valorous
invasion of a small Third World country also locks the USA into a
mechanistic conservatism, whereby the future holds more, much more, of what
we see already. There can be no break with the present, only extrapolations
from it. This creates a determinism that thwarts true inventiveness and
imagination. The very ‘‘might’’ of the USA may not be enough to rescue it
from collapse under the weight of its own grandiose pretensions to liberate
the world. Cuba, supple and ingenious, tells another story; and shows that
loss of industrial dependency doesn’t have to mean chaos and ruin. Cuba,
not for the first time, and certainly despite many past mistakes and
blemishes, is good news.
It is fortunate that the USA is unable to recognise this; otherwise, its
desire would certainly be strengthened to ‘‘develop’’ (or even worse, bomb)
Cuba into extinction.
(The author lives in Britain. He has written plays for the stage, TV and
radio, made TV documentaries, published more than 30 books and contributed
to leading journals around the world.)
email yrn63 [at] dial.pipex.com


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EN SU NUEVA ETAPA, PDVSA DEBERA CUMPLIR
EL HISTORICO PAPEL DE PUNTAL DE DESARROLLO
DE UN NUEVO PARADIGMA ENERGETICO SUSTITUTIVO
DE LOS COMBUSTIBLES FoSILES POR UNA FORMA DE
ENERGIA NO CONTAMINANTE, POR UNA VENEZUELA SOBERANA
Y LIBRE.
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¡ LA HUMANIDAD CLAMA POR LA PAZ, ALTO A LA GUERRA
CONTRA IRAK! - ¡Basta de guerras!
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