Pat Murphy: Well, 2 years ago when I became interested in Peak Oil I didn't see an obvious solution and there were no models available and someone suggested I check on Cuba, which I did, and it turns out that in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union pulled out of Cuba and the economy collapsed, that Cuba also lost their oil. The country had been subsidized quite heavily by the Soviet Union both in terms of finances, but more importantly in terms of oil. Those shipments were cut almost overnight and the Cuban economy went into a deep depression. Things were extremely serious, the average Cuban lost 20 pounds, because even food was short – electricity was cut off for 12-14 hours a day. It took a couple of years for Cubans to get through this very, very tough survival period; many Cubans went blind simply because of malnutrition. But what the country did was realize that they had to immediately completely restructure their economy and their whole perspective. Cuba had been part of the Soviet Union economic sphere and their role in this sphere was to provide sugar to the Soviet Union and its subsidiary countries, and of course that left them with almost no agriculture of their own, so they very quickly had to change the agriculture, not only in terms of not using as much energy, but in terms also of the crops.
Cuba had been the most heavily - or had the most heavily industrialized agriculture in Latin America – it was using more fossil fuels for pesticides and fertilizers than any of the other countries – so this had to stop overnight. It forced the Cubans to rebuild their soil, to change their crops, and to change their diet. So during this period they went from a sort of modern collectivized agricultural or industrial system to an organic farming system based on small farmers. They actually went through the society to find people who had been farmers at one time and might have moved into the cities and these people moved back out to the country. So the end result after 10 years was a major increase in the soil fertility, a complete change in the crops, and the ability to actually have their own food system.
The Cubans also changed their diet: they became sort of quasi-vegetarian, because the animal crops, in fact, and all the ways we raise animals based on grain takes a lot of fossil fuels. So from that perspective changing their diet, changing their educational system about diet, and basically they became much more of an agrarian culture than an industrial culture. Now this influenced the whole society, and nutrition and food became a key part of the educational system and during the crisis period – even continuing today – all Cuban students spend several weeks working in the fields as part of their educational process. The education process was also extended to the general population, and the general population was encouraged to get involved in food production and one of the more interesting things about Havana is the number of gardens throughout the city: there are a substantial number of roof-top gardens. I visited one site where a man was raising hamsters, rabbits and chickens on top of his roof and he was also raising grasses on the roof to feed to the rabbits. Throughout the town of Havana, or the city of Havana, there are gardens everywhere; some of these are quite massive, like 7-10 acres. Any land available in Cuba or in Havana, someone can apply for it with a business plan and if the plan is adequate then they are given that land to farm.
So the focus in Cuba was to build a much healthier food system - their soil is now much healthier than it was, very few chemical and other agricultural oil-based inputs, growing the food actually in the cities, you'll see a large number of raised beds, sometimes simply in parking lots because it became clear to the Cubans that if they were growing food out in the country, they had to transport it. So in many cases, what they did is they transported a great deal of the soil, and put this simply on top of parking lots and grew in that environment. So they've now become food self-sufficient, maybe more than any other nation in the world in the sort of more developed areas. They stopped growing wheat and rice, because of the tremendous amount of inputs that were needed, and then later they learned how to develop new forms of agriculture for rice on smaller plots. So to some extent Cuba is this great organic farm. Also they use more animal traction now: when the system collapsed they didn't have fuel for the tractors and there was a major breeding program that began for oxen, so throughout the countryside you'll see people using oxen to plant rather than machine traction.
Another interesting factor as part of the rebuilding of the soil is they developed vermiculture - that is worm-culture. So throughout Cuba you'll find worm-farms: and a lot of the agricultural trash or food-scraps are taken to these worm-farms, and fed to the worms, and then the worms produce the soil, and then the soil is transported to various other areas to rebuild it. So it's an agricultural system that can maintain the people, I think they are now up to about 90% of producing their own food versus all the imports and they're probably down 90% from the inputs.
The other thing that Cuba did, and I think this is also part of a drift towards an agrarian culture, is they began a heavy process of reforestation. The island had been denuded of trees: I think at the time of the beginning of this change it was about 13% forest, they raised this very quickly to 18% and I believe their objective is to go somewhere around 20-22%. So the food system of course was the first priority and then the environment was the priority, not so much for the environment, but if you are going to build a sustainable environment you need forest, so they are rebuilding the forest (not only) for the general health of the environment but also to be able to achieve sustainability. That was the first effort.
The second effort was on transportation. Like all nations, Cuba wanted the private car and that became the objective just like it is in every other country. Well, it was instantly aware that the private automobile could no longer be the goal of the country, and the private automobile was really limited to people who have special needs or who have maintained some record of performance. So the Cubans, there was no time or money for anything like installing light rail or subways, so they just began building surface vehicles that provided the mass transportation. There is something called the camelo, an oddly shaped vehicle that will carry 300 people, and it's pulled by a conventional diesel tractor system and these are very, very cheap, and you just see them all throughout Havana. In other parts of the country people took just flat bed trucks, and welded seats on top of them and steps, and put a canopy over it and formed their own transportation system. So what you saw that Cuba did, is that with a great deal of innovation and using the existing resources, they developed a mass transportation system based on every possible kind of conveyance, including horses. They instituted a policy of hitch-hiking so that if you look around you'll see people are hitch-hiking everywhere, and Cuba is a pretty safe place so there isn't any particular danger in that, and the young people use hitch-hiking extensively. The government has a program, a sort of a highway patrol, which are people who are strategically located on the highways wearing yellow uniforms and they have the authority to pull over any vehicle so people that want to ride somewhere go to one of these spots and wait in line and this quasi-highway patrolman watches for trucks that are coming with certain classifications of license plates, stops them, fills them with people and then moves on. The thing that was so fascinating was the way they did this so rapidly and used the existing resources they had. So this was a very serious transformation for the society, and probably the most important thing is Cubans had to give up their view of an industrial/materialistic future, the kind of direction of the world that's been going on for many decades now and they had to shift their focus elsewhere.
**** [10:20] In their history before the revolution the health had been atrocious when they had been occupied by the Spanish and other forms of colonization, so medical care became a very high priority and Cuba now has more doctors per capita than for example, the United States, maybe than any other country in the world. And this has actually become somewhat of an export industry for Cuba, because they have these great medical schools and they can turn out qualified doctors fairly rapidly and so other countries actually will hire Cuban doctors. They don't leave and move there, but they come, they'll take, say a 1 or 2-year contract and then return. For example, in Venezuela, they provide quite a bit of Cuban oil and in return they use a large number of Cuban doctors.
The emphasis on medicine there, although they have bypass surgery and all the other complexities, the emphasis is on prevention and one of the other characteristics, one of the requirements is that the doctors must live in the neighborhood of the people they serve, and so in many cases a Cuban doctor may be walking down the street and see some patient with a particular malady that they're aware of, say smoking a cigarette or eating a pork sandwich, and they'll stop them on the street and give them a little lecture on health. So the Cuban doctors also are very heavily evolved, they view this more as a vocation than a particular career and they get a great deal of pride based on the health statistics in their neighborhood. So although the material collapse was very important, there were no mass deaths or famine from this, even though people lost a lot of weight, and I think it was because of the really high quality medical care system, and that remains a priority of Cuba.
Cuba now is providing medical training for other countries, including some people from the United States, from inner city areas. They'll bring in students and train them, and then the obligation for both the students from the United States or the other countries is they have to work more in the poor areas rather than in any, say, rich capitals of the third world. So the medical care is important; Cubans have the same life span as the United States and their infant mortality rate is actually better than the United States because they put a lot of emphasis on infant care. Well, continuing on, if you have medical care and provided food, then the next most important thing in Cuba was education.
When the previous government collapsed and the revolution came into place, one of the first actions was to take students and send them throughout the country and to teach the older population how to read. So this was phenomenal, there were tens of thousands of students, some of them maybe sixth or seventh grade, others, say, early high school, and they just went out into all the villages and spent several months and educated the people in the villages. So there was an instant literacy program that, within a year, had achieved most of its objectives. So from that time on, education was very important – just as medical care is free, education is free all the way through college. All students will go up through the high school period and then some percentage goes on to college, which is less than ours, but I don't know that percentage. But again, it's kind of on a competitive basis where whoever performs the best, has the best grade, goes into the university system.
****[14:20]Cubans really love children, you can really see it throughout the culture, and children are very, very highly valued. When I was last there I was up on a coffee plantation and I saw a bunch of high school students and I talked with their instructors and they told me again how agriculture and getting involved in growing food is part of the curriculum, and so these students were up here for a month to pick coffee. Some further things he mentioned was that Cuba had changed the high school system to where, instead of students coming in and taking a series of courses and changing teachers every year, they had determined that it worked better for the students to have the same teacher throughout a period of time, so that the same teacher will teach them for a four-year period, so that they identify with the teacher and develop some bonding that you wouldn't do in, say, a typical high school situation. I asked him, "How do you deal with the fact that you must have a much wider variety of subjects to teach?" He said that the focus is on providing a lot of aids, particularly computer aids and computer learning so that the students could get a lot of the technical information from the books and other types of courseware, but it's the relationship with the teacher is what was important. So that emphasizes the focus on education. Their education's also quite varied – they have during the school year the conventional courses of academics, reading, writing, arithmetic, but in the summers there's a very extensive summer school program, a set of camps called, I believe, the Pioneer Camps. And there the students will spend some months in these camps and then they start learning more physical skills. They'll learn, say, fishing or boating and not only farming **** [16:28] and at some schools will (learn things) like weaving. Each territory in Cuba has some specialty so the students, they'll focus in that area.
There's a major adult education program as well, a lot of this comes through their educational TV, and they have very, very extensive educational TV as well as night school. And this becomes a priority and as I said, they're becoming more agrarian and less industrial, so the priorities become medical and educational.
And then the third priority is, oddly enough, the sports program. Cubans score very high in the Olympics, I think (there are) 11 million people, and in the last Olympics they got 12/14 medals. And I talked to one of the teachers, another teacher who is actually a sports teacher, and he said this is very important in terms of the Cuban educational system, particularly for teenagers, because they discovered if the students don't exercise and if they're not active physically then it affects their mental capacity. So they feel it's very important to learn team-building and sportsmanship in terms of the sports program, but also it has another effect in that they do better in the mentally-oriented activities.
So the other thing that's important in Cuba is the social security program. Men retire at 60 and women retire at 55. So the combination of the agrarian agriculture, the medical system, educational system, retirement, gives Cubans a sense of security which offsets the tremendous lack of material goods. Now, in terms of material goods, I've noted that in Cuba, the private automobile is just about non-existent, and I looked at many Cuban homes, their homes are much, much smaller than ours and much simpler, they don't have to have complex heating and air conditioning systems because of the climate. A typical Cuban home is probably 900-1000 square feet, while a typical American home is 2300 square feet; I believe that's the average house size built today. So they have much smaller homes and the furnishings are very simple, there's not a lot of overstuffed furniture in the living room, it's kind of simpler, wooden furniture with cushions. And that also is not too much of a concern for Cubans because they are a people who really live socially, they're out in the street, in the squares a great deal. The Cuban culture, being sort of an African-Indian culture, there were always a lot of close personal contacts, a high priority on the family, and then an extension of that into the neighborhoods. And they're a gregarious, outgoing people, so it's quite typical for you to get a knock on the door and you open it up and it's the neighbor and he says, "I'm having a party, and I don't have enough food or drink or coffee," and you give them whatever's necessary to keep the party going and then they reciprocate. So there's a lot of intimacy that exists in the Cuban culture.
Well, music is very important to Cubans. There are musical bands everywhere, I think if you go into almost any restaurant, certainly in the capital but even in the outlying areas, there's liable to be a three or four-person band. A lot of times these are older people – you find a lot of these musical groups will be say, men in their sixties and seventies. So that type of music sort of permeates the culture and there's also a strong focus on dance – Cubans dance a lot. And I went to a nightclub in Cuba – which had a really good show, but what I noticed was it was not just adults; it was also children, so families would come into this place and when there was dancing you would find the young people dancing with the older people, sons with their mothers. So that's very significant and you see a great deal in public. If you go down along the Malecón, I'm not sure that's the right word, but it's the boardwalk along the ocean, at night you find groups of young people, say, with a boom box and they're dancing and they have these very intricate routines that they've developed. So that's another aspect that you see of their life: if you don't have a lot of material goods then what are your options? Well, your options to a certain extent are music, dance and socializing, and so that's quite significant there.
I think the barriers that exist in Cuba, first there are the political barriers, in the sense that ever since the 1959 revolution and then the Bay of Pigs, Cuba's been considered a hostile power to the United States and we see this reflecting, we have all kinds of situations develop. There was the time when all the people came over on the boats, and the two governments were always somewhat manipulating each other as much as possible, and then we had the Elian Gonzales situation in which the question of did the American election turn on what took place with Elian Gonzales - so there's this great tension that exists, at least at the official level. You also have a situation in Florida where the older Cubans that came over very early are extremely antagonistic towards Cuba, but then the younger Cubans who actually came to this country more for opportunity than for political reasons, there's conflict because they want to actually support their families at home. And then recently the visits between Cubans were limited and this meant that Cubans in America could not visit their homes; they could only go once every year or two. So you have this paradox where some of the Miami Cubans are hostile and want to bring the government down and others just want to have open relationships so they can travel. I think it's very difficult for someone in the United States to perceive what's happening in Cuba because of the propaganda and the differences of opinion so it's very difficult to actually experience the culture.
The second factor is, and where I think it will be very important, is when Americans start to understand what Peak Oil is and what it implies. In my own work, in terms of Peak Oil, I see there's sort of like Kübler-Ross's five stages of denial and acceptance, and I don't remember all the stages, but people first understand it, then they resist it, then they accept it, and then they become very frightened because they see a fundamental way of life and it's very difficult for people to work through and come up with some model. Now from my organization's perspective and even in the way I personally live, the small community is that model, and if we start with the perspective of small community and concepts of greenbelts and then carry that forward to where those greenbelts are actually doing local food production, and then possibly you bring back backyard gardens, suddenly you may have moved into this environment that the Cubans have been focusing on since the early 1990s. So what I feel will happen as the consciousness about Peak Oil grows, it will sort of move into what are the options, and we will consider high tech options which will really keep us from making major changes, and then we'll start to see the possibility of a small community agrarian culture, and at that point I think the Cubans then can provide us some sort of technical support, maybe some sort of organic support. I think that it's interesting when we look in this country at the growth in organic farming, I'm sure that the number of organic farmers is certainly in the tens of thousands, and if you go to Cuba where maybe 20 percent of the population are involved in agriculture, 20 percent of 12 million people gives you say, 2 million organic farmers who have been practicing this very strongly since the 1990s, supported by a whole government and educational infrastructure to develop better organic tools, such as biocides, that are used to other insects. I can see some day when we're into the trimming up with solutions for Peak Oil and we've hopefully worked through the animosities, that we could actually be bringing Cuban farmers in, in droves, to accelerate our change to a more fossil fuel-free agriculture.
Well, Community Solutions is, basically that's a new term, the name of our organization was Community Service, focusing as I said on small community, and a couple of years ago we began to understand the implications of Peak Oil and realized that the solutions were actually going to be found in small communities. And so we sort of came up with a program, our official name is still Community Service, but we operate with this sort of brand name of Community Solutions, and we're looking at what are the solutions, principally social and cultural that are going to be necessary to get through the Peak Oil period. So we write papers on that, we have an educational program, we attend a lot of the meetings around the world like The Association for the Study of Peak Oil (& Gas) and then we report on that to our readers and then we report on Cuba – we've made three visits there in the last eighteen months and we plan to make some more. Actually I've been asked to bring a set of Americans down and talk to some of the people in the government agencies about Peak Oil – even though they know how to do without oil, they're not quite aware of the direction - I'll be doing that after the first few months of 2005. The other thing we write papers on is: we'll analyze some of the options. We've done a lot of work on hydrogen, which is an option that is really being promoted far, far too heavily without any analysis, and we'll actually collect the information from other people and then present that to people, kind of tempering their enthusiasm to hope for a techno fix, which keeps (us) from making certain changes.
We've just put on a conference which was called the First Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions and we had 200 people that came to that. It was very, very successful, had a tremendous set of speakers, all who are focused on the community solutions, small communities, local communities, relocalization and these are people both from the permaculture areas, and the intentional communities, as well as people who actually work in areas of eco-cities. So we plan to continue our educational program and move more and more into the design of low energy solutions, and educate the world about that.
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