BEHOLDER: 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).