Lounging

...I think he's in denial about the looming potential power outages. Hasn't started snowing yet, but I cut a conference trip short to be back home ahead of the blizzard.

Also, it's not an apocalypse, it's a blizzard, the suggestion that the world is ending because of 2 feet of snow requires a serious reframing.

the message and the medium

Something that smells like mint...

With the inbox under control (bam!) I spent some luxury time categorizing photos--personal shots, "hey that's me doing research" shots (thanks to Joe these are the first ever photos of a wild Linds in her semi-natural habitat--for natural habitat see couch + pajamas + book shots), farm shots and so on. Unfortunately, for the wider audience I unceremoniously dumped them in one folder to share online, but as I develop this multi-year project and give presentations and use photos in my class as examples (urban farms, draft animals, political sites...) I'm trying to be a little more organized (read: procrastinating on writing my book proposal).

hey that's me doing research!

My professional website has a better detailed explanation of what I'm getting up to research-wise and I don't care to rehash it here in journaling form. Very basically I'm trying to figure out who benefits from these type of exchanges. Ultimately, I realize that all my research and teaching is about power relationships. So there's that.





What I want to think about here is the more intimate and personal nature of being both a participant in this research as well as the investigator. Approaching the forbidden isle was difficult. There's a lot of baggage (literal and figurative) there. What is most shocking perhaps is the audacity of our foreign policy and how it shapes the opinions of visitors. Selfish. That is the best way I can describe it all. But I noticed some signs of change too:

new digs

What I found, I'll let Joe speak for himself on this one, is a place and a nation that is doing okay. To say resilience, to argue thoughtfulness, to promote the replication of ideas is to barely scrape the surface. It is not a place of isolation, anger, poverty, dictatorial control. It is not. Some personal observations: very little graffiti, clusters of people around limited wi-fi hotspots, no advertising, tourists from everywhere (even a governmental delegation), beautiful architecture, crumbling architecture, sugar cane, rum, baseball in the street.

The stairs at the Univ. in Havana, where PhDs complete

We met with a number of different agencies including solidarity groups, local communist party chapters, research foundations, food and farming outreach, and even the agriculture ministry. We also toured several farms (urban and rural), historical sites (read: Che, Hemingway), and sampled local cuisine (read: meat and rice).

Statue at the Che memorial

And so, some things I am considering:

On food:

We saw a lot of greens being grown, but that did not translate onto the plate, the greenest thing on most of our plates was cabbage (which I love, so no problems there)--at one sitting there was chard and everyone piled their plates high. 

I was chided by my colleagues upon my return to the U.S. from my last trip for not taking pictures of my food, so this time, I took a photos of every meal. And here is just a sampling of some of those photos, which predominantly display our very meat focused diet--mostly beef, pork, and chicken (incidentally most poultry is imported from the U.S.). I managed to avoid the chicken, and just threw out my other food-based idiosyncrasies while our choices were limited. We did have a meal at one vegetarian restaurant--an outlier if you will...

But really the most often non-meat substance we saw gracing our plates was rice. Apparently, on a global scale this population is the 2nd largest consumer of rice.

from the veg restaurant

fried plantains...yes please.

local macro-brew in the background

I think this was described as 'lamb elbow'

it is the centerpiece...also cabbage

Couldn't resist the regional take on spaghetti

personal staples, beans + rice, sadly no tortillas

my own personal rice stack

One thing I have not yet seen in my travels in the region is micro-brew. So imagine my surprise to come across not one, but two different microbreweries in the city. Although they did have a slightly party-style take on things. Also, our choices were clara (light), oscura (dark), and negro (in this setting, very dark). I should also mention that they were  mostly okay--tasted a lot like homebrew.

Cerveza Oscura 

Cerveza Clara

I think I've seen this beer delivery system in a casino...

Joe swears one of these says 'dunkel'

micro brewery

On farming:

urban permaculture site

sugar cane

One thing that surprised me was that everyone is growing sugar cane--even in small urban sites. Guarapo, sugar cane juice is a treat (it tastes grassy and mildly sweet) and the grassy part is used as animal feed.

cut sugar cane

guarapo

There are a wide variety of different styles and sizes of farms in the country--we saw various examples and had the opportunity to ask questions and talk about strategies and such. This is quite possibly one of my favorite moments--here is evidence of a place that has seen peak oil.

Knowledge:

ladybug

At the beginning there were a lot of questions. At the end there were a lot of opinions. One thing that struck me most deeply was that after seeing the amazing examples of permaculture and agroecology on small- and medium-sized farms there is this feeling of trying to render the island static. Put differently, outsiders don't want to see the practices change, see corporate agriculture swoop in and change the face of production. And if we're being honest, without trying to take a snapshot and keep Cuba picture perfect, I have concerns about corporate agriculture too. But this way of thinking really denies the agency of the people, the government and their interests. Luckily this is a pilot and so I can't make any broad sweeping claims about what people learned or imparted on each other yet. But I can say that it is a fabulously interesting question and I think it will propel the research forward (yaaas!)

John as Che

Also, although I only captured a few photos as we were driving along, one thing I really enjoyed was the complete lack of advertising in the country. Seriously, all of the billboards were propaganda (that's another conversation for another time).

roughly: it is the country that grows

No hurricane, physical or ideological may bring down the revolution

Venezuela is not a threat it is hope

Some other beautiful/fun things of note:

My favorite of the bunch

taxis

also taxis

enjoying honey straight from the hive

still taxis...they were everywhere

ceramics and pirates

in the bamboo

not too close to the peacock

Hemingway's bust at the sea

So I am now plotting for my next trip and considering what will change between now and then...as it might be a year in the making...

Approaching the forbidden isle

seriously tiny tacos

We rang in the new year as quietly as possible--given our location--by occupying the outdoor corner of a beach-side restaurant in a place we visited in anticipation of our charter flight across the straight. [My apologies for the unwieldy sentence.] We enjoyed some of the tiniest tapas ever created by humankind and rosé. Upon reflection we noted that we were just on the periphery of the madness (and fireworks) making a study of a "destination" new years being undertaken by quite a variety of different people.


It was rather illuminating to see what tourism can look like in peak season. I often think about not acting as a tourist while being a tourist, and after witnessing a few days of a rather more intense tourist spot, I can affirm (for myself at least) that there is a broad spectrum of tourism. I well and truly hope that with this stop as an exception, we more often fall on the lower impact end of that spectrum. Because after being here for a couple days, one word sums it up for me: spectacle. Pure spectacle.

Also, perhaps somewhat snarkily, I began to wish I had put together a 'stereotypes' bingo card, because everything that I imagined this place could contain emerged over a short time period from thong bikinis (not pictured here) to hyper-surveillance (panopticon style). Bingo!

I'm likely supposed to say something about my commitments for 2016--such as I will try to make my desired 52 posts here (ha!) --however,  I think I hold the aspiration to improve in my heart and mind always. It was drilled into me early and often (see posts tagged PhD). So it goes...


...but I digress.

This larger trip served two purposes for me. First and foremost it was a research pilot for a new project that is tied to my other recent fieldwork trip. Second, it was about taking an opportunity for traveling together and visiting somewhere new.

Our trip was based around (you guessed it) food and agriculture. My research is about access and inequalities in the system and about knowledge exchange through tourism (see next post). As I mentioned in my previous post, this is an exceptionally interesting time to consider food and agriculture in (on?) the forbidden isle and we were not disappointed.

Getting there has gotten easier for U.S. citizens, but the charter flight system is the best example of the kind of relaxed approach to things that I have come to find in my travels in the region. So after a very long day of travel to go about 200 miles we were met with an unpleasant reminder of why things might be this way:

"Blockade: the longest genocide in history"

This picture says a lot. And it is not lost on me that in the state of the union speech this week, the embargo--which is about so much more than just exchange between the US and Cuba (it is well and truly a blockade)--was listed among the top items that need to be changed. I have seen this sign a few times now, most notably outside of Cuba (while in Basque Country in October) and most immediately on the drive from the airport into the city. The blockade is ever present and made to stand out to visitors.

So we've been sifting through the photos we took (across four devices--mwahahahahahahaha) a smaller selection can be seen on the album page (linked here and on the right hand sidebar). There are quite a number of photos of people on this trip and this is a huge departure for me as I am unaccustomed to documenting my research participants in such a way. But the new work is inclusive of how people are interacting in these spaces. More about "these spaces" in subsequent posts.

...beyond sifting through photos, upon our return I did my best to methodically triage and deal with the almost 300 emails I received while away. An (artificially) high number that astounded me, since we are still on holiday break for the next month...