Watch this film!

Imagine urban gardens supplying half of the fruits and vegetables for the nation’s largest city. Imagine flourishing ecovillages set in the midst of lush food forests. Imagine a country whose agriculture is 4/5 organic thereby reducing almost to nothing its dependence on petrochemical fertilizers. Imagine compost-producing worm farms as a major national industry and yoked oxen taking over from diesel-starved tractors. Finally imagine this: farmers being among the society’s best paid workers. It’s not just a permaculturist’s daydream, it’s Cuba today.

We just watched The Power of Community, a 53-minute documentary directed by Faith Morgan and produced by a group called The Community Solution. It was inspiring. The film tells the story of “how Cuba survived Peak Oil”, a story that needs to be told more widely, especially here in the Fox News-addled, gas-guzzling Estados Unidos de America. Surely it skips lightly over the questions of widespread hunger, authoritarian government and the many painful mistakes that must have been made during the so-called “Special Period” of the early 1990s when Cubans had to learn to do without the oil, subsidies and markets of the defunct Soviet Union. But the film doesn’t try to give a comprehensive history of Cuba in the end of the 20th century, it focuses instead on how “community” pulled the country through its energy crisis and why we need to pay attention to how they did it.

Cuba had to face “energy descent” with breath-taking suddenness. Their transition from a fossil fuel-based economy happened almost from one day to the next with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. In particular, oil from the Soviets had powered Cuba’s “Green Revolution” in the face of the 30-year-old U.S. embargo. Suddenly, they had to feed themselves and run their modern country without fuel for trucks, tractors, buses or cars. Their economy had depended heavily on export crops (sugar) that needed chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. When the flow of Soviet oil stopped abruptly, Cuba ground to a halt. The emblem of that period, shown several times in the film, is the image of a man slowly pushing his car up the road.

The Power of Community shows how Cuba survived. They learned how to get around on bicycles, how to implement organic agriculture, how to eat healthier foods, the importance of building the soil, the value of local food production for local use. They learned that they had to break up the big state collective farms and encourage private initiative. They rediscovered the power of the sun for hot water and electricity production. They used the Problem of an energy famine to come up with the multi-faceted Solution of locally oriented, self-sufficient communities.

Watch this film to find out what’s ahead for us Yanquis and how ill-equipped we are to deal with it. Watch it also to marvel at what the Cubans have accomplished and to be, at least a little bit, reinvigorated with hope.
See you in the streets and gardens!
Lev