Document(s) 16 of 34

An overview of current work

The Metropolitan Park of Havana (PMH) is an urban, ecological, and social project being developed around the last 7 km of the Almendares River, the most important river of the Cuban capital. It overlaps four of the capital’s municipalities — Playa, Plaza, Marianao, and Cerro — an area of great cultural, racial, and social diversity.

As an urban project, the PMH will have 18 attraction sites spreading over its 700 ha of land in the centre of the Havana. Whereas preexisting structures were eliminated to create the other big parks in Havana — Lenin Park and the Botanical Gardens — the PMH will retain the dense urban network of industries, military entities, and population centres currently occupying the territory.

As an ecological park, the PMH will address the deforestation problem in the zone, the uncontrolled social and industrial waste, and the general lack of care of the region that threatens the area’s flora and fauna and the Almendares River itself. The development of the PMH depends on recovering and, in many cases, re-creating natural habitats, as well as developing mechanisms for these to coexist with the city and its inhabitants. As a social project, the PMH will provide a space for a population of nearly 9 000 inhabitants. The program takes a participatory approach: through collective planning and a reliable process of consultation the residents will have an integral role in planning the development of the park.

The PMH is committed to integrating development, environmental recovery, education, and participation — concepts that are frequently addressed independently in large urban-development projects. Investment plans for the park take into account its environmental impact and the objective of real participation.

Objectives

The objectives of the PMH are to

• Create a “green lung,” with multiple functions, and improve the environment by integrating the park with the Almendares River;
• Demonstrate a sustainable and participatory approach in which problems are converted into opportunities;
• Promote contact between the park’s inhabitants and nature and elevate the quality of the environment;
• Contribute to environmental education at all levels, from the most basic to the highest scientific level;
• Create sources of employment;
• Offer various forms of recreation and tourism;
• Raise the standard of living by improving the environment and level of cultural conscience, as well as preserving and promoting historical sites;
• Promote sports activities for people in Havana as an integral part of a broad conception of culture;
• Maintain the park’s most important factories in production, such as the brewery, the paper manufacturer, and the lumberyards, while minimizing their environmental impacts;
• Develop an urban, holistic, ecological, and self-sufficient form of agriculture; and
• Organize the park’s economy to guarantee that it is self-financing and sufficiently profitable.

Today the PMH has gone past the stage of analysis and is in the planning phase; the fundamental mission, objectives, and goals have been determined, and a process of strategic planning has been developed with community participation.

Interdisciplinary team

PMH’s interdisciplinary technical team is currently being consolidated. The philosophy of the team is that practice is the criterion of truth. Its composition will be determined in due course as members attain a greater degree of understanding of the constraints on the program and the feasibility of alternatives. This means approaching reality with holistic, not sectoral, vision and ensuring that each specialist is well rounded and knows the fundamentals of every discipline involved. The technical team has been divided into working groups focused on different programs and different suburbs.

The agricultural program

In 1960, revolutionary legislation introduced the notion of cooperative property. However, only in 1975 did the idea gain acceptance. As a result of the cooperative movement, the farmers in the area decided to form the Agriculture/Livestock Productive Cooperative (CPA), named Vincente Perez Noa and founded on 7 May 1988.

Owing to numerous problems, this cooperative did not have a long or fruitful life. A lack of clear delimitation of properties encumbered the productive process. From its inception, the CPA exhibited serious organizational and functional problems as a result of several changes in the directorship and the instability of its membership, which had various causes, including the lack of interest in, and love for, the work and difficulties in managing to do the work with good results. Economically, the cooperative could not keep up with production plans because of the scarcity of inputs (which is not to say that they did not exist) and because unstable and unmotivated contract workers made up much of its work force.

As a result of these problems, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) decided to dissolve the CPA and confer these lands on the PMH administration, which was to elaborate a holistic development strategy. The principal goal was to integrate agricultural production into the strategy of the PMH, because it was still not known what could be done for agriculture in the park. For this reason, the technical team decided to hold two workshops to coordinate efforts in thinking about and constructing a new agricultural strategy — one workshop with the technicians and specialists of different institutions and the other with the producers.

In the first workshop, the following fundamental objectives were proposed:

• To determine the prospects for an agricultural and livestock industry; and
• To come up with a coherent work strategy to develop this capacity.

Participants also emphasized that the PMH’s agricultural and livestock activities should be fundamentally urban, agroecological, intensive, and sustainable. A plan of action was elaborated, and the immediate tasks were quickly executed to maintain continuity with this workshop and prevent certain serious problems. Incorporation of the development criteria of the producers was also a priority.

The second step was to set up a workshop with the agricultural producers in the area. Taking the first workshop as a base, the team elaborated three central thematic questions to guide the discussion:

• Agricultural, livestock, and forestry production — What would be the essential characteristics of a successful agricultural and livestock scheme in the PMH?
• Commercialization — How should commercialization be organized to secure the mutual benefit of the producers and of the park?
• Organizational structure — How should the organs of production interact? (What forms of association should the producers adopt?)

Both producers and experts participated at this workshop. They collectively identified the following barriers to the development of agriculture in the area and defined the goals of the project:

• Organizational structure — Organizational structures for agricultural production vary in Cuba, including the CPA, Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs), state ranches, farms, and private-land tenancy. Although private-land tenancy exists on a small scale in the park — and thus forms a part of the existing socioeconomic structure — private farming should not be promoted; rather, efforts should be directed to discovering the potential of other existing organizational structures. The UBPCs and state ranches, on the other hand, require major extensions of land unavailable in the park. The state ranches have a complex organizational structure, including an administrative apparatus. The experts, the farmers, and the PMH team agree that the best means of organization would be the progressive development of small farms integrating cultivation, livestock production, and reforestation. To solve problems of dispersion and the lack of personal incentive for production, separate farms of a reduced size will be created. Each family will get partial ownership of a plot and be in charge of
  
  production. Reducing the size of the farms will help to address technical problems — such as risk — and the problems of administration and directorship. The structure of small farms will also facilitate the integration of the PMH’s lands: agricultural activity will become more closely interconnected with other activities of the park.
• Deterioration of the soils — One of the objectives of the PMH is to locate agricultural lands in the most fertile regions and support methods to protect and improve the quality of soil. Research is under way on this matter.
• Shortage of a clean supply of water for agriculture — The agricultural zone of the park is part of the hydrographic region of the Almendares River, specifically of the subregion of Santoyo Creek. Both of these sources of water are contaminated. The goal is to develop reliable sources of irrigation water for agricultural plots and for aquaculture.
• Producers’ lack of training and resources — The level of technical training among the farmers varies. Some cultivate without using effective traditional methods, and others are prevented from obtaining better results by their limited access to resources. In general, obtaining supplies, such as seeds, fertilizers, and tools, is problematic.
• Lack of physical protection of the agricultural area — As a result of Cuba’s economic situation, farmers’ crops are often stolen, which acts as a disincentive to production. It is essential to guarantee farmers’ earnings and shield them from external threat by organizing an adequate system of protection.
• Lack of mechanisms to commercialize agricultural production — At the time of the research, the PMH had no plan for commercializing surplus agricultural production in the park. Producers have commercialized their own products through the agricultural and livestock market and in other ways. Commercialization takes time and energy from the productive activity of the farmers, so the farmers asked the PMH to organize this activity.

In the medium term, the agricultural program’s goals are to deal with each of these problems. The program’s objectives are to achieve a better organizational structure of the agricultural area through

• The organization of small organic farms of 2–4 ha (five are planned for the first 3 years);
• The creation of an organization or institution to provide services to farmers in the area;
• The organization of farmers by zone; and
• Joint participation of the farmers and the PMH in planning production and commercialization.

The project proposal

We propose that Oxfam Canada assist the PMH team during the initial stages of the project. This proposal combines key aspects of agricultural planning in the area with the implementation of three specific subprojects: creation of the first integrated farm; development of mechanisms to facilitate the participation of the farmers; and development of an organization to provide services to the PMH’s agricultural producers.

The project zone covers about 151 ha in the municipalities of Marianao and Cerro. The proposed organic farm will be in Santa Catalina (population: 528), a suburb of Pogolotti (population: 11 200), in the municipality of Marianao.

Although developing agriculture in a park could be seen as self-contradictory, the PMH team proposes to develop this activity for the following reasons:

• Agriculture in urban zones would be fundamental to improving the food security of some sectors of the capital. This fits in with a national policy of recuperating urban spaces for agricultural cultivation to supplement the basic food supplies of urban residents at a low cost.
• The PMH needs to organize ecological, integral, and self-sufficient agriculture, integrated with the park’s other activities and objectives, including economic sustainability for the farmers, recuperation of the environment, and the aesthetic compatibility of agriculture with other park activities.
• The park’s agricultural community needs to be motivated to solve its problems, and this motivation needs to be consolidated in a voluntary and participatory approach to agriculture. Some proposals to generate participation are to create the mechanisms for consultation and dissemination of information about the park’s projects and plan and execute a program of environmental education and reforestation.

Specific goals

1. Organize the 53 producers of the area into four zones to facilitate the dissemination of information, environmental education, and training — This idea emerges from farmers’ and producers’ meetings and workshops. Such an organizational structure would be used to develop an education program for environmental and technical capacity-building. The participatory process would rest on the agricultural producers’ already established structures of association, such as the participatory local governments in the park. Those involved will determine the priorities of environmental education in their areas.
2. Create an integral experimental farm of 4.3 ha — The proposed farm would be located in the suburb of Finlay and Marianao, an area selected for its good soil quality. Single crops would be rotated with multiple crops. All of its waste products that are primary materials would be recycled to sustain the productive system. Self-sufficiency would be the goal: both the produce consumed by the farmers and the majority of the supplies needed by the farm’s animals and crops would be produced on the farm. This farm would be the first of five planned for the next 3 years and would serve as a model for the organization of the rest of the land parcels.
3. Create a centre to provide services (work supplies and assistance teams) to the producers — In the first years, 16 workers dependent on the labour centres would be employed by a service centre. Once the service centres disappear, the independent farmers would become the park’s focus of attention, and they would have access to the equipment and tools that had been administered by the service centre.
4. Complete three essential studies needed to plan and organize agriculture in the park — Three essential studies would be needed: one on wastes and the quality of the water, one on agricultural supply and the market, and an evaluation of the organizational forms of the integrated farm and service provider. In each case, the approach would be to integrate the results and findings of the study into the planning process.

As the interdisciplinary team is new to urban agriculture, it is receptive to all suggestions, ideas, and advice.

Document(s) 16 of 34