Over the past 25 years, Cuba has built a largely organic farming system out of necessity. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba lost its main supplier of fertilizers and pesticides. What will the changing U.S.-Cuban relationship mean for Cuban farmers? We air a video report from a farm outside Havana produced by Democracy Now!’s Karen Ranucci and Monica Melamid. We also speak to filmmaker Catherine Murphy, who has studied Cuba’s agricultural system.

Transcript

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AMY GOODMAN: We continue our coverage of Cuba with Catherine Murphy, a filmmaker who lived and studied in Cuba in the ’90s. Her film titled Maestra explores the stories of the youngest women teachers in the 1961 national literacy campaign in Cuba. Catherine Murphy joins us from Miami.

We want to welcome you to Democracy Now! We’re going to be playing another piece of Karen Ranucci’s looking at organic agriculture, very interesting in Cuba, Catherine. But it also goes to the issue of private enterprise, not just small mom-and-pop shops, you know, restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, but what about the multinationals? How are they preparing to enter Cuba, Catherine?

CATHERINE MURPHY: Well, yes, I think there is a lot of desire on behalf of the multinationals to enter Cuba for the untapped markets, with a large buyer, even though there are only—well, there are 11 million people on the island, but there are central buyers for key food and agriculture products. So it’s a large market for the corporations. They are hungry to get into those markets. But the Cubans, I think, have both a need for increasing key imports and also a lot of healthy skepticism of not having—not giving the corporations too much space, not losing key industries on the island and not losing control over key sectors of the economy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go to this second piece of Karen Ranucci’s from her recent trip to Cuba, this one looking at organic farming on the island. It begins with Fernando Funes Jr., who runs a farm outside of Havana.

FERNANDO FUNES JR.: This land belongs to the previous farmer living here. He is now 96 years old. The land still belongs to him, and I farm the land. So it’s part of the appropriation of the land, but in another way. So you care the land, you farm the land, and until you can.

Well, we started here with one bed two years ago, and now we have more than 100 beds, in which we produce vegetables to sell directly to the consumers in the city. All what we do here is based on organic agriculture practices. And there is a criticism about organic agriculture, which is not able to feed the world. And we think it’s the opposite. We can take advantage of the knowledge already accumulated for hundreds of years of farmers and the knowledge from science. We manage the system in a way that doesn’t need the use of pesticides.

We have beehives in the farm. When you have enough beehives to start as a beekeeper, then the government starts providing you this advice, technical advice, and also inputs the boxes and other materials necessary to grow faster. And we don’t see that problem that is already identified in different countries, like in the United States, about beehive or honey collapse. We see that they are growing very, very well.

In the last year, there is more and more possibilities for farmers and for the whole population to participate in the economic relationships that follow food production or services. There is the possibility to start new businesses based on food distribution and also on food processing, in order to increase the capacity to make use of production. With organic agriculture, with agroecology, we are able to produce healthy food in order to grow healthy people in the cities and in the whole country. And when we have this kind of system, then we can also assure that we have enough labor for the people in the countryside and better expectation for them to live better from their work.

WOMAN FARMER 1: [translated] I was a librarian.

WOMAN FARMER 2: [translated] I worked in public health and then in a day care center.

WOMAN FARMER 3: [translated] I worked in a dairy factory making yogurt for children.

WOMAN FARMERS: [translated] We earn more here.

WOMAN FARMER 1: [translated] I worked in education for 10 years, and my salary equaled $15 per month. It was never enough, because I had to commute back and forth, and it was expensive. Since I came here, I am doing better economically.

WOMAN FARMER 3: [translated] I’m doing better, too. Now I can raise pigs for food, which is very expensive.

WOMAN FARMER 2: [translated] The food situation is critical, because it’s very expensive. Cuba is an underdeveloped county, but it is a good country. Here, if someone needs blood or an operation, the state takes care of it.

WOMAN FARMER 3: [translated] It’s all free.

WOMAN FARMER 2: [translated] Yeah, it’s all free. In other countries, if you don’t have the money, you die. Not here.

FERNANDO FUNES JR.: Now, we have, for two months, not rains in the farm. It’s been very hard for us. We were watering last night until 8:00 in the night by hand, in order to make better use of the water we have available at this moment. In the future, in the near future, we plan to have irrigation systems for all the beds. This well was made by hand, and we dug until the 40 meters deep by hand. And there was one man that had enough will to dig the well as much as I had, and was Juan Machado.

JUAN MACHADO: [translated] I was 14 years old when I learned to find water. Here it is. Right here, there is running water. Look! Look! I’m not doing anything, and the stick is going up. Look! Here’s the water.

FERNANDO FUNES JR.: We went already to different places around, to different farms, where Machadito identified water. And I went with him, and I am trying to learn. So we are trying to connect all the energy possibilities in the farm in order not to use oil. We pump the water with the solar panels and the solar pump. Then we collect—we capture the manure and the urine to this mixing tank. The slurry, the manure with water, goes to the biodigester. We have there a tank of 10 cubic meters. The first layer is fresh manure. The biogas press the already fermented manure, and that goes out. We’re getting out the energy in biogas that has the manure, and then we use that biogas for cooking, and we have enough biogas to cook every day as much food as we need. Michael is writing his Ph.D. thesis. Now he’s living at the farm, and we are sharing the—let’s say, the administration or the design of the farming system.

MICHAEL: For those of us involved in sustainable farming, to open relations with the U.S. or to lift the blockade means that many agrochemical companies want to invest in Cuba. These companies investing in Cuba doesn’t mean there would be enough food for everyone—1.2 billion people worldwide are hungry. Despite more agrochemical investment, despite having warehouses full of food, these are companies that make profit from the food they produce. Just because they produce doesn’t solve the hunger problem.