ON A CLEAR DAY, looking down from the Lomas de la Canoa in central Cuba, you can see the ocean some fifteen kilometers to the north. From here, the contours of the coastal landscape gently taper away from the forested highlands
ON A CLEAR DAY, looking down from the Lomas de la Canoa in central Cuba, you can see the ocean some fifteen kilometers to the north. From here, the contours of the coastal landscape gently taper away from the forested highlands of the Sierra de Jatibonico in a patchwork expanse of agricultural fields, towns, and small farming communities. Beyond them are the semi-deciduous trees of Caguanes National Park, cradled on the coastline next to the mangrove forests and wetlands of the Ciénaga de la Guayabera. Just offshore, the tropical Caribbean waters of the Jardines del Rey host an array of cays and skerries that provide habitat for permanent and passing bird species as well as vacation destinations for migrating tourists. Between the ocean and the dense woodlands, the fields and rocky highlands, the vista from the lomas is one of a dynamic landscape: picturesque, complex and diverse, like pieces of a puzzle that have grown together over decades of reciprocal flux.
This is the view of north central Cuba from the town of La Picadora, located on the Sancti Spiritus side of the province’s border with neighboring Ciego de Ávila. Geographically, the region is set apart from the rest of the island, nestled between a modest range of karst mountains to the south and the forested coastal peninsula to the north. While tourists frequent the offshore beaches of Cayo Coco to the east and the urban centers further south, few ever venture into this narrow strip of land that runs one hundred kilometers between the cities of Remedios and Morón. Despite these unique regional attributes, however, what is most interesting about La Picadora are not the things that make it distinct from the rest of Cuba, but rather what it shares with the island as a whole.
As with many other agricultural areas in Cuba, La Picadora was once the site of a thriving sugarcane industry, entailing vast monocultures of the perennial grass that occupied most of the lowland areas along the coast. A majority of La Picadora’s sugarcane, once harvested, was sent to any number of regional mills to be processed and prepared for export. Since the times of Spanish colonialism, this had been a familiar pattern for rural Cuban communities and landscapes, one that not even the radical politics of the 1959 revolution were able to break completely. But from the heights of the Canoa hills these days, the only evident pieces of this history are fading linear patterns that once designated breaks in the massive fields of sugar. Old roads for heavy machinery that are now more frequently traversed by bikes, horses, ox carts, and aged automobiles.
The landscape that has come to dominate this region is very different from the landscapes of the past. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Cuban economy became unsustainable almost overnight, in particular the heavily-industrialized agricultural sector, which for decades had been tied directly to subsidies and special trading agreements with the USSR. This marked the onset of the Special Period in Time of Peace (or simply, the Special Period), a decade of generalized economic crisis for the island. Sparked by the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, this crisis was exacerbated by the tightening of US sanctions, which had been in place since 1962 but which were newly bolstered through the passage of the Toricelli Act of 1992 and the Helms Burton Act of 1996, which further restricted trade in an attempt to strangle the economy and force the end of socialism in Cuba.
In the vacuum of Soviet support and in the face of a persistent US embargo, the Cuban state had few options but to dramatically restructure its entire agricultural sector from the ground up. The crisis opened the political space for farmers and researchers, who had been calling for a transition towards sustainable, organic and agroecological approaches for decades, to gain power and lead in this transition. Over the next thirty years, Cuba gradually moved away from a solely petroleum- and input-dependent model of agriculture based on the export of predominantly monoculture crops, especially sugarcane, towards a more diversified, localized system of small-scale and family farms, many of them implementing sustainable, low external input methods of agroecology.
All over Cuba, in places such as La Picadora, these shifts have induced dramatic social, economic, and ecological changes, resulting in both landscapes and communities that have come to reflect three decades of radical agrarian transition whose implications, while profound, remain understudied and misunderstood. What research does exist, not just from La Picadora but from places across Cuba, paints an interesting and complex picture, one with potentially much to teach a world confronted by the concurrent problems of the climate crisis and rising socio-economic inequality.
To