The Spiritual Dimensions of the Permaculture Movement in Cuba

Rose Caraway

doi:10.3390/rel9110342

Abstract

Following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, Cuba experienced an acute economic crisis in the 1990s known as the “Special Period”. This crisis challenged not only the state’s ability to provide for Cubans’ material needs, but also the moral vision of creating a “New Human” within the Revolution’s political framework. During the Special Period, a variety of new religious and civil society movements emerged to meet both the material and spiritual needs of Cubans. Permaculture, a holistic design system that arrived from Australia in 1993, promotes more harmonious relationships between human beings and nature through a set of three ethical principles: (1) Care for the Earth; (2) Care for People; and (3) Sharing Resources. Within the Cuban context, the growing permaculture movement is part of a larger set of religious and civil society revivals since the fall of the Soviet Bloc. Using qualitative fieldwork, this paper argues that permaculture is functioning as a religious-like movement in Cuba because it provides both spiritual and material benefits to individuals through networks of mutual aid and social solidarity. The permaculture movement also provides flexibility for individual perspectives about nature as sacred and having intrinsic value apart from usefulness to humans.

Highlights

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991, Cuba utilized a highly centralized, conventional model of agricultural production on large-scale nationalized farms
Through an analysis of qualitative interviews with Cuban permaculture activists, this paper explores the connections between spirituality and permaculture
As a holistic movement that addresses spiritual as well as material concerns, permaculture arrived in Cuba in the early 1990s and was able to spread because of the larger changes that were occurring in civil society at the time

Summary

Introduction

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991, Cuba utilized a highly centralized, conventional model of agricultural production on large-scale nationalized farms. Within Cuban permaculture, there is a particular emphasis on mutually beneficial relationships, such as cooperation rather than competition, and redistribution of resources This too has been shaped by Cuba’s material context, but it rests upon an ethical and spiritual concept that seeks to reorient how human beings view themselves in relationship to the natural environment. When founding FANJ, Antonio Núñez Jiménez felt that the ethical vision of harmonious relationships between human beings and nature would serve as the backbone of the philosophical foundation for the NGO that took his name Best known for his epic journey from the jungles of the Amazon to Cuba in a dugout canoe (which sits in the FANJ museum in Sancti Spíritus), Jiménez declared in 1997 that permaculture could play a key role in the development of a “culture of nature” in Cuba. FANJ spread permaculture with these ideas through a highly contextualized three-part method, creating networks that united permaculture activists who have a wide variety of personal backgrounds, identities, and relationships to institutionalized religions

Methodology

The Cuban Special Period and the Arrival of Permaculture

FANJ and the Expansion of Permaculture in Cuba

The Spiritual Dimensions of Cuban Permaculture

Findings

Conclusions