Two blog updates in one week. I must be turning into quite the social media mogul over here. But alas, it is only because I totally forgot that today an article I have been working on for a while was finally published with Orion Magazine. My co-author for this pieces was Margarita Fernandez, a long-time friend, mentor and collaborator on all things Cuba and agroecology. Margarita is the director of the Caribbean Agroecology Institute at the University of Vermont. She is also an incredibly talented researcher, scholar and advocate.
The article, titled This Cuban Town Has A Sustainability Lesson to Share takes a dive into some research I recently completed for my dissertation looking at a small, rural town in central Cuba, called La Picadora. Since the sugarcane industry left the region almost twenty years ago, La Picadora has undergone a radical shift from large-scale, industrial agricultural production to small-scale, diversified farms implementing agroecology. This shift has entailed vast social, economic and ecological changes which my research aimed to document and explain.
I’ll have more to say about this research in future blog posts, especially after I publish the academic article version of it in a journal (hopefully soon!). But for those that want to take a gander at this more accessible, and interactive version, the link is included below:
https://orionmagazine.org/article/cuba-la-picadora-agroecology-sustainability/