Lessons Learned: Training Caribbean Farmers’ Minds

Cuba leads by example in its efforts to teach farmers to be leaders and critical thinkers

Lucienne Cross was a January 2014 Cuba Delegation Participant

Cuba is a different world—at least that’s what I thought after visiting in 2007. In the United States, words like “solidarity” and “revolution” leave a bold flavor in your mouth, but in Cuba they are a plato típico, a “typical dish,” and signs about community replace corporate billboards. When I returned seven years later, these painted billboards praising Ché, quoting Marx or saluting the Revolución were only slightly more faded from the Caribbean sun. Many worry that “experiences from the island nation do not apply to other countries who have not had social revolutions, or who do not face food crises,”[1] but my recent trip to Cuba revealed that the country has many important lessons to share.

Traveling with Food Sovereignty Tours last January gave me the privilege to interact with agricultural leaders and systems that emphasize the same community values visible throughout the country’s messaging. Cuba has a remarkable structure within the cooperative agriculture system, inclusive a majority of farmers, headed by the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP). Inspired by what I learned on the tour, I began working on farms throughout the Caribbean to discover how these lessons could be applied.

Our delegation had the rare opportunity to visit ANAP’s Niceto Pérez National Training Center. The school trains Cuban and international farmers in agriculture as a method of both food production and community organization. ANAP also maintains a comprehensive and multi-level network of promoters and coordinators who provide ongoing training to farmers. According to a professor at Niceto Pérez, students are “never told the Cuban model is the ideal.” Instead, the school enables students to advance in any system by arming them with the tools that are most important according to the school’s vision of a farmer: critical thinking and leadership. In Cuba there is a definitive movement to consider farming as a pivotal spring for community organizing and a profession for constant learning and horizontal sharing of knowledge. In Cuba, this is a government priority.

It was clear that in order to feel empowered as farmers rather than wage-laborers, these youth need more skills-based training.

Following the tour, I began working on a cocoa farm on the island of Grenada alongside the first two young men out of fifteen youth to be hired by the Cocoa Farming Future Initiative (CFFI) through a USAID grant. However, Grenada does not have the same intricate system of training as Cuba. While these two men received a week of instruction from local farmers, the task of transplanting trees was done based on “I remember seeing my dad do this when I was a kid.” It was clear that in order to feel empowered as farmers rather than wage-laborers, these youth need more skills-based training.

In response to the lack of training opportunities, CFFI organized a technical cocoa grafting seminar, bringing in experts from the Cocoa Research Centre in Trinidad and sponsoring twenty local farmers to attend. Due to overwhelming interest and a testament to how rare this attention is in Grenada, over forty farmers and cocoa representatives attended.

The training sessions quickly became a platform to discuss barriers. While the will to protect nature, engage youth and expand knowledge mirrored the rhetoric commonplace in Cuba, Grenadians also acknowledged the lack of resources, government bureaucracy and incapacity to educate youth. Despite these barriers, training remains at the top of the agenda for organizations like CFFI.

After Grenada, I volunteered on a farm in Trinidad alongside Erle Rahaman-Noronha of Wa Samaki Ecosystems. He trains farmers in permaculture throughout the Caribbean, including a European Union funded program for a community in St. Lucia. According to Rahaman-Noronha, most farmers are eager to learn. What they need is “to develop experts in the community”—essentially like the leaders who graduate from ANAP’s school—so that the knowledge remains after the experts pack-up and go home.

What makes Cuba exceptional is the Cubans’ ability to turn their pro-farmer rhetoric into action by establishing comprehensive, multi-level systems. Other countries may not have governments that prioritize farmers’ minds, but the Cuban system is just one model from which lessons can be applied. With assistance from organizations such as CFFI or USAID and most importantly through community organizing by farmers themselves, access to training can improve. Through opportunities to discuss in solidarity, structures that allow this knowledge to last and spread can be established in ways that reflect the priorities and particularities of each nation.

Sources

1. Rosset, Peter Michael, Braulío Machin Sosa, Adilén María Roque Jaime and Dana Rocío Avila Lozano. 2011. “The Campesino-to-Campesino agroecology movement of ANAP in Cuba: social process methodology in the construction of sustainable peasant agriculture and food sovereignty.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38:1 (January), p. 186.