 I have really strong will kids, so they're going to be wherever they're going to be. They want to be as a nursery, like it's a really fun flavor of all, but they need, they want somebody to be there with them. Yeah, no, I don't want to be there. Thank you so much. It's really sweet. No, it's so good. Have you had something? No, I haven't had something for a long time. I always start a new job on Tuesday. I have my job at Trevon. Oh, boy. I'm a big fan of yours. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. I just wanted to say, Willie? Willie. Hey. Can you hear me? Yes, awesome. I don't think we need this. I don't think anyone needs this. Oh, you're less. She doesn't even know. Good evening, everybody. We're going to start gathering around and beginning our more programmatic portion of the evening. So as you're eating or chatting, maybe take a minute to finish up your conversation, and you can gather these seats around the tables. You have plenty more seats if people come in. Okay, so I know we'll all be rolling in and out, and there's lots of conversations and delicious food. Thank you, everybody, for bringing food to contribute tonight. And so my name is Graham, you named Srufinakte. I work in an organization locally called Rural Vermont. I'm also a small farmer in Marshfield area. Rural Vermont, just to say a brief piece about ourselves, has been around for more than 35 years. We're a farmer-farmworker-led, member-based, not-for-profit organization that works through education, organizing, and advocacy to work towards the needs of our agrarian community. Small farms here in Vermont. And we're also connected to these larger movements and efforts working towards these goals nationally through our membership in an organization called the National Family Farm Coalition, and through that in an organization called La Via Campesina, which you'll hear more about tonight, which is part of a larger global movement for food sovereignty, agroecology, human rights, and the rights of the environment. I think the next thing I want to say is that this event tonight is co-hosted by Rural Vermont, by the Caribbean Agroecology Institute, represented by Margarita here, and by this ongoing process and group of folks who are calling right now the Agroecology School Collective, which is a group of organizations and individuals working towards starting a school for agroecology, in Vermont, hopefully as part of a larger network of agroecological schools in North America, modeled after agroecological schools existing in other parts of the world and connecting to that movement. And I'm going to give you all briefly a rundown of what this evening is going to look like. So, we're largely here to learn about, discuss, and share histories and experiences with the peoples and places in the agroecological and liberatory movements of Cuba, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and to love our children in one another. Hello, my name is Willie. And to hear about some particular programs and relationships and exchanges that are established and offer participatory opportunities, and to share and grow real opportunities for greater solidarity and networks of solidarity and mutual aid. And with that, yeah, please. So, we all have valuable voices to share here tonight, and part of the goal here is to bring all of your voices into this conversation. And as a part of this, we're going to have a few main people I want to introduce now who are going to help bring us through this evening and this work and this agenda. I'm going to start by introducing Yorlis Gabriel Luna. Yorlis. So, Yorlis is here representing the Asociación de Trajabadores del Campo, or the ATC, in Nicaragua, and the Latin American Institute of Agroecology at Ishim Elu, if I pronounce that correctly, and La Via Camposina. Yorlis has been a community organizer and popular educator since she was 12 years old. She is an agroecologist, beekeeper, and herbalist. Thank you, Yorlis. Niels McEun has supported international delegations of La Via Camposina and visits to Cuba since 2013. He is staff support for La Via Camposina, North America, and also collaborates with the Institute for Agroecology at the University of Vermont. And then we have Margarita Fernandez, the executive director of the Caribbean Agroecology Institute, or the CAI, which is a small nonprofit here in Vermont that catalyzes knowledge exchange, builds capacity, and supports transitions to agroecological systems that are resilient to climate change and provides sustainable livelihoods, rooted in justice and equality in Cuba in the region, and also coordinates the Cuba U.S. Agroecology Network. And she might tell us a little bit more about those projects here tonight. Yeah. And again, thank you all for coming. With that, I am going to hand this over to Yorlis and Niels. Muchas gracias a todos por venir. Vamos a comenzar con un ejercicio. Nos ponemos de pie, por favor. Everybody stand up. We're going to start with an exercise together. Vamos a estirarnos un poco, estirar nuestro cuerpo, respirar. Start by stretching a little bit. Stretch your body. Take a deep breath. Esa conciencia de nuestros pies sobre la tierra. Vamos a ir sintiendo. The awareness of your feet upon the floor. Nuestra respiración. Y vamos pasando, tomando conciencia del espacio donde estamos. Being aware of the space that we're in. De lo demás. Being aware of one another. La otra edad que tenemos acá. And the others around us. Y movamos los brazos a un lado y al otro que hay frío. Move your arms a little bit because it's cold. Y ahora sí. Vamos a hacer, quedamos de pie. Porque en este tiempo hay mucho trabajo sentado. Entonces nos volvamos a compartir. So let's stay standing for a couple more minutes because these days there's so much work that people do sitting down. Y vamos a contar nuestros nombres. Y porque en una sola palabra sí. Porque estamos aquí. So we're going to do a round of saying our names. And in only one word. Why we're here? Just one word. Soy Yorlis. Y estoy aquí por esperanza. I'm Yorlis and I'm here for hope. Henry and I'm here for anti-capitalism. Watch out if you use more. What was your word? Anti-capitalism. I'm Yorlis and I'm here for Cuba. Sofia and connection. Rocío and community. Me llamo Fiona y estoy aquí para curiosidad. And Melissa I'm here for curiosity. My name is Graham and I am here for connection. My name is Kathy and I'm here for resilience. My name is Vivian and I'm here because I'm curious. I am Carl. I'm here for community radio. One term. You have to tell us either like a saying from Vermont or like a local joke or something. Or a riddle. Someone help me out with this saying from Vermont about things that we do to make sure that we are frugal with things. We use it up. Make it do without. Thank you Molly. My name is Carlos and I'm here because I wonder. Dvorak curiosity. My name is Erica and I'm here for food. My name is Evan and family. My name is Margarita and I'm here for making connections. My name is Shannon. I'm here to support my colleagues at Royal Vermont and to support our friends from Nicaragua. Thank you so much. What should be Shannon's punishment? My name is Valerie and I'm here for solidarity. My name is Elle and I'm here for my mom. My name is Molly and I'm here for family. My name is Nils and I'm here for y'all. You didn't get out of it. Sorry. You gotta do like a riddle or a joke or something very Vermont of Vermont saying anything. Something very rural Vermont. I don't know what Molly just told me but it was something about taking my long johns off. So I don't have anything good but I'll think about this your lease. I'll have something by the end. Perfect. So if we connected community and connection, we have seven people. Saying the same thing. And if we add solidarity, that's all part of one idea which is empathy. Understanding ourselves beyond color, shape, origins. We're human beings. And if we weren't all here together, we might just be at home by ourselves. We're going to do a couple. The one we have on the right or the left. We're going to start here. I'm one and two. One and two. One and two. We're going to do it. It's not going to be a couple. It's going to be a big group. No. The one and the two are together. The one next to you so you don't know. So no. We're going to do it over here. You're going to find a partner. Hopefully it's not the person who you came here with. You're going to take a deep look in their eyes. For about a minute. And we're going to try to see if we can feel what the person is feeling. We're looking into each other's eyes and seeing if we can feel what the person is feeling. We're going to try to guess. In one word. Because to understand we have to speak short. We're going to ask. Do you feel tired? Do you feel. And the other person who has to answer. Will say yes or no. So you can ask the person do you feel tired. And the other person will say yes or no. You can say do you feel thrilled. They can say yes or no. You can kind of ask them with one word and motions. How y'all doing? Need some more time? So it looks like at least a couple pairs been able to guess what the other one's feeling. If you've been able to guess what the other person is feeling. Some of their emotions. I'll show you how this is going to look. The next thing we're going to do is. You feel boring. Do you feel tired? Do you feel like going resting at home? The idea is that after we guess what the person feels. Just looking at their eyes. We try to make a hypothesis of why they feel like that. What need is behind that feeling they're feeling. So we start to get an idea of what the person is feeling. Then we try to create a hypothesis of why the person is feeling like that. We try to guess what's making them feel what they're feeling. So take another moment with your partner. You'll see why. You'll see why. How are we going? How are we going? We're going back to the big circle. One more minute to close and go back to the big circle. So what do we have to do for you guys to end the quick talking? Does this one work? How did you feel? So why did we start with this exercise? As a group we originally planned to do a mystic. Sometimes in mystics we think it's just about putting flowers and candles. The mystic is life, it's about spirituality. How do we bring our full selves into this space? And not be the body separate from the mind. And that's what capital does, it separates everything. So how do we construct or build community? If we're not able to understand that behind every face, we bring feelings, emotions. How can we start to change that logic of capitalism? Especially in our most intimate spaces of community. That was the objective of this exercise. We want solidarity, we want community. How do we start to break the ego centricism? And we start to put ourselves in minds and our hearts and in each other. So I put some pieces of paper folded up over along the tables. I want you to open them up. Especially for those who've said that they were curious. There's different articles from today's various newspapers about news from Latin America. So from our communities, from our streets, from our neighborhoods, sometimes it's hard to have that empathy that moves us as community outside of our comfort zones. How are we going to think of the other that's happening in the south? It's impossible. I'd like one or two people to volunteer to tell us what they feel, what they think in reading these newspaper news articles. And if there's no volunteer, we're going to do it with the hot paper ball. Did everyone read something? It's difficult to have hope when you read something like this. They're all different. It's difficult to have hope. Anyone else? Someone else? Some comments, some reflection of what you're seeing. Many, many, many come without reading the cards. Work for people who have money. And I don't, you know, when I was working there, I was working two jobs. Living with someone with lots of money. And working in a place where we actually had someone cleaning purposely so that she could be paid well. And part of me, my moving there, they were wherever the people are who come in and round up all of the people that are hugely necessary in our community and take them away. And people are going, what am I going to do without my house cleaners? What am I going to do without the person that cleans my streets or takes my garbage out? So for me, I don't understand, no comprende, I just don't understand. And I go from a different state and such, and it's similar. And I don't want to blame the people who have money where I used to live. People are creating nonprofits to be able to support these kinds of things that are happening in the country and the world. And for me, that is what we need to be doing. And I grew up more. I grew up trying to find working, just working, farming. Whatever I could move to places that I thought would be good, interesting, and I could find work winter or summer. And so I'm here. And I came because of resilience. We're all here. We're family. I don't care what we look like, where we come from. I don't care if you're green, purple, we work. We support each other. I don't care if you have money or no one. Support everyone, be kind, be gentle. Talk to each other. Let's reason things out. So, thank you. Thank you very much for sharing. Another person, the one person who wants to share, what she felt with the image. I thought it makes sense to read what it says. What I'm responding to. So mine says, Tesla can't build in northern Mexico if water is scarce, President says. And I agree with that. If there's no water, don't do that. The first thing I want to say to the woman here is that the world today is very complex, but it's not that today is complex. Today's world is very complex, and it's not just today, it's just all throughout history of capitalism. It became a hegemonic system that brought much pain to the working class, to farmers, to indigenous people. But we can't lose hope. We have to be like the bees. I'm sad, and I feel like I have no hope by going sit and look at the bees. If you go and watch the bees every morning, they're old, sunny, raining, they go, they fly and all. And sometimes I think maybe they'll sit and not do anything, but no, they keep going, they keep living, talking with the flowers. And after they give up, we need to find that path to dialogue with lands and with others in those moments too. We could create hope, and it's not lost that that's why we're all here, too, to offer our hearts. And so I think all of us want to offer our hearts to our friend, right? Yes. So I brought these images today with us because all of us are bombarded by information and images. And oftentimes it's decontextualized information. It's manipulated for what to precisely generate these diverse emotions. And more than just this news, just as much as there's images and faces in all of these pieces of paper. That the call in this space is that there's always a lot more than what's just on that piece of paper and in that news and in those images. And that the call in this space is that there's always a lot more than what's just on that piece of paper and in those images. And so it's up to us to look in the sub-soil of every idea, of every news, of every communication to find the threads of truth, the threads of experiences. And so that's the mystic to be able to think about more than beyond here. So in the late 80s, when in Nicaragua, the revolution was lost. For many people, it was like the end of history. But for those of us who stayed, for my parents, for my grandparents, the history didn't end there. We kept struggling in the Via Campesina, the international social movement was born in Nicaragua. Because the Nicaraguans went and asked other social movements and now what do we do? What is the path? What is the Via Campesina? And the answer is the Via Campesina, the farmer's path. Yes, a little bit. The story, history is cyclical and things are always changing. So a little bit about the context of the importance of Cuba and Nicaragua, Venezuela. So in the history over the past 200 years, since after colonialism, it's turned towards Latin America for America. So the Monroe Doctrine is born and much of what happens in Latin America is because of this doctrine. So what Latin America has is natural resources, cheap labor. And that caravan of immigrants that is coming, the realities that are coming there, and that caravan of migrants that are coming. And they're coming because of the economic model that is coming. And they're coming because of the economic model and they're coming because of the causes of the economic system imposed in the US. And not just from the United States, but from all the global north. And I say this not for you to feel guilty because it's not your fault. It's an economic model based on colonialism and inequality and unequal distribution of resources. Does any of you have a private plane because if we're going to ask you to leave, if you do? It's not a situation that any of one of us is guilty. It's the system with an elite. So one example in the minds in Central America what the Canadian companies take in one day is the equivalent of what a community will get in 50 years. So there's been such a huge degradation of natural resources. So there's a huge loss of just a way of life. So in all of this context of this history Cuba has been a bastion example of a country that has said no. If we're going to make mistakes, there are mistakes. So since Cuba and the Revolution triumphed it brought many other countries with it and a culture with them. And that's why there's so much hate. Cuba was the second to do a negrarian reform to give an idea of how we could do things differently. And that's why there's more than 60 years of a blockage so in this context of Cuba and economic sanctions super cruel for Nicaragua and for Venezuela for everyone to say no. It's urgent to have solidarity and solidarity is empathy because after everything we're all human beings and really these sanctions are against the people. And all of this is not to make us all depressed or to feel bad. And so it's because we have to move. In Nicaragua we say when a frog falls into a bucket of milk they have to move until they make the milk butter. So we have to move. So in all this context, political, economic, social context the farmer movements keep moving. And the people also to live and to live with happiness. And so this space is for that to share about some of the work we do in Cuba and with that I'm going to stop. I'll just quickly say thank you Yolise and thank you Nils and Margarita for offering translation for us all and maybe just a quick interlude for those who don't know there's bathrooms one right in there inside the exit door there's one there and there's one on this side as well and I see a hand right there. It sounds like maybe something we'll end the event with. Does that sound good? Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like we'll take a break so it sounds like we'll take that recommendation and end the event with a song. And for now I'm going to I think pass it or Nils am I passing it to you or to pass it over to Nils to give us a little bit more context. Great. Thanks so much. And thank you Yolise for getting into the question of current events you guys have these different snippets of information and I think the way that we want to try to frame this evening because the idea is to talk about Cuba but also Latin America is to try to understand a little bit just why it's so important to rebuild the solidarity movement in the United States after what seems like a hiatus a while of sort of relative silence. I've been really impressed by the three weeks that we've been here in Vermont. Everywhere we've gone people have told me and Yolise about different kinds of work brigades that they organized from that place in the 1980s to go to Nicaragua and do work there. Sister co-op projects that existed. An enormous amount of community understanding of the principles of solidarity and of reaching out to one another as people. And so the task that I have tonight is to just share a little bit about what might be not so recent news around Latin America and some of the developments that seem like they're of a lot of importance for people to understand in Vermont. And I guess one really good way to start was what Yolise mentioned, the Monroe Doctrine this year celebrates 200 years. 200 years of the same doctrine of America for the Americans which is the ironic way of saying America for the United States. All of the continent, all of its natural resources. If they happen to be outside of U.S. borders it doesn't really matter. It just might make their extraction cheaper because they belong to U.S. capitalists. That's the idea. And there's actually a really good snippet if we can get internet at some point we'll show you from the head of U.S. South Command the military about what Latin America represents today. But it's revealing and it's also a lot more of the same, right? Of seeing the fact that other people have water as water for the United States Strategic Reserve as seeing natural gas and oil as belonging to the United States as seeing lithium as belonging to the United States. So for example, just to start a little ways back we talk about the last decade in the 1990s. This is after the Santa Nista Revolution fell and efforts to create sort of a much, much better country in many countries in a much more fair continent were basically defeated by the end of the 1980s. And so the last decade refers to the neoliberal reforms with structural adjustments which meant privatizations. It meant the end of public education, the end of public health care, the end of public water, the end of public electricity. So privatization was also connected to the loss of labor law and environmental law, so the degradation of these laws so that foreign companies could come in and extract at a higher rate of return. In that it was also connected to the dismantling of all tariffs and trade protections. So what this meant is that Latin American countries were sold the myth of sort of free trade and competing on the world stage which in practice meant sort of a race to the bottom. And so wages fell and spending power fell and poverty expanded. And one way to tell this story is that the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela which was followed by a new constitution in Venezuela and then a new constitution in Ecuador, a new constitution in Bolivia through electoral processes were a very important generational change, meaning fighting through weapons hadn't worked and so fighting through winning elections was going to be the new strategy to try to bring social reform and basic social justice to Latin America. And when Baby Bush went to Panama in 2004 was it to try to advocate a free trade agreement of the Americas, Latin American leaders said no. And instead they proposed something that was called ALBA which is the Bolivarian alternative for the Americas. ALBA means sunrise in Spanish. And that idea is it's time to build something fundamentally different that will be about cooperation and not competition. And in which we have an agreement not between governments and big business but between our peoples. And so the basis of this was complementarity instead of competing around natural resources we could look for ways to complement one another's strengths and so in many cases what this meant was discount petroleum from Venezuela arriving to all kinds of countries in Latin America without any of the conditions that the United States or major corporations put on access to energy resources. So these countries could develop without the blackmail that they're accustomed to. It also meant Cuban doctors traveling around Latin America and attending to the poorest populations in cities and in the countryside in places where people had never received medical care in the past and being able to fix their cavities and Operation Milagro which sent poor people from across Latin America to Cuba for a cataract surgery allowing them to see and then after a couple of weeks the recovery fly back home with no cost. So there were a series of measures which were sort of this vision for an entirely different ethic within Latin America. And there's a lot of successes to mention of the first decade of the 2000s in that sense. The Latin American School of Medicine was founded in Havana in 2004 and via Campesina which is a social movement which is not including government powers autonomous from all political parties was also interested in all these progressive changes, right? Was agitating, was radical within those progressive changes and was able to develop an articulation of schools for young people from social movements that connect agroecology working the land with small farmer futures and land reform in processes of political understanding. And so these are called the Iyala Schools the Latin American Institute of Agroecology. And so all of these different efforts have contributed to an understanding of a second independence an independence that's based not just on formal sovereignty but on substantial sovereignty sovereignty over people's farmlands, their forest lands, their coasts, the minerals under their soils, their seeds, their water. And this kind of sovereignty which is reflected in some of these new constitutions in Latin America represents a problem for monopoly capitalism which is under some pressure, right? Since the global financial crisis and there's been a renewed need for capital to have direct access to land and minerals. And so there's been a mining expansion more like an explosion since 2008 there's been what we call land grabs across the continent where the wealthy basically figure out how to transfer value towards stock markets by pushing people off of land and using armed guards and putting up fences and looking for speculative markets that are interested in the real estate for mining or other extractive industries. And the United States of course has played the role of defending the interests of mining companies defending the interests of the most predatory kind of capitalism and unfortunately that has meant since 2008 with the coup d'etat in Honduras a series of efforts to overturn democratic processes in Latin America. After the coup d'etat of Zalaya in Honduras there was a parliamentary coup d'etat of Fernando Hugo, the liberation theologist president of Paraguay. Then after that there was a coup of Dilma in Brazil an attempted coup in Venezuela there's been the most recent was the coup d'etat in Bolivia in 2019 oh no there's another one just last year a few months ago the coup d'etat in Peru and unfortunately the United States is behind every one of these the State Department immediately endorses the new government there's all kinds of money opportunities put forward to talk about moving past the political problems and so the Monroe Doctrine is still valid of punishing those who have any sort of independence and favoring those that buy into the line of shifting wealth as quickly as possible towards the north and in this context there's the bit of a new wave of electoral victories of the left in Latin America I think there were eight elections last year and the left-wing candidate won all of them in Latin America so from Colombia which had become a NATO country Colombia is like the Israel of the United States in Latin America seven military bases Colombia has now elected a progressive who used to be a guerrilla fighter and has been a peaceful politician for the last 40 years but has brilliant ideas Gustavo Petro there was an election in Mexico after many many years many generations of not having any progressive presidencies there's been an election of a center-left government Brazil Lula has come back into power defeating fascism in Brazil and there's a long ways to go towards defeating fascism in Brazil but winning the election was absolutely vital so there's a real effort to defend women's lives there's a real effort to defend nature there's a real effort to defend solidarity and memory and we I think have a role in this effort particularly because of the extraordinary role that the United States has played historically in repressing democratic processes in Latin America and extracting value in creating poverty and then taking advantage of that poverty to declare that there's no democracy there and intervening again the United States has carried out 469 invasions since its founding and over 250 of those have been since 1990 so the predatory nature of the United States towards Latin America is not under debate but what we do want to talk about is something that's extraordinarily important for absolutely everyone from Latin America it's one of the things that's the closest to people's hearts and one of the things that is the most painful and that is the blockade of Cuba Cuba is something that if you speak to people in Latin America there's an extraordinary amount of love towards Cuba an extraordinary amount of love and if you go to Cuba there is an extraordinary amount of love for the world I was a student there it's somewhere that it makes one scratch one's head about how it is that there can be so much love towards humanity and so much hope in a situation that is really painful which has to do with the economic blockade of Cuba John F. Kennedy started and has continued to this day so we're going to move into more specifics but that's a little bit of an overall framework to try to understand what we want to talk about tonight thanks so I'm trying to think as I listen to your Lisa Nils and just such an incredible background and you know exercise to get us in the mood and context about the history and the role of the United States and so I'm sitting here thinking of all the different things that I want to bring to all of you you know I don't think I'm going to I was planning on talking about what my organization does and I think I'd rather get more to what we can do together so I'm going to briefly talk about what we do just because some of what we can do as a community it could be through our organization so the Caribbean Agroecology Institute has been working in Cuba since 2008 and I personally have been working there since the late 90s and one of the sort of main things we've been doing was sparked during the normalization of relations moment of Cuba and the United States so I don't know how many of you are familiar with what happened in 2014 so Obama and Raul there was a bunch of back channel negotiations around lifting the sanctions and the Pope was involved and you know a lot of different negotiations in Canada and eventually it was a prisoner swap so Alan Gross was in Havana he had been there in Cuba in prison for a few years and the five heroes from Cuba who were in Florida some of them from up to 20 years so anyway the prisoner swap happened and then both Raul and Obama announced on the same day December 17th that normalization of relations would begin and so of course this was just everybody was surprised everybody who worked in Cuba who lived in Cuba I mean nobody saw this really coming and it was just celebration in the streets it was like finally there is hope that this is going to end and shortly after that and we had just really begun working more deeply with the agri-cology and environmental movements in Cuba and it was just a tsunami of interest from people in the United States wanting to get engaged with Cuba including Big Ag including big companies and so this group called the U.S. Agriculture Coalition for Cuba was formed headed up by and represented from Cargill and so then amongst sort of people in the United States who are working towards agri-cology and food justice came together and said we need to have a counterpoint to this group and so we formed the Cuba U.S. Agri-cology Network really to show Cuba that there is a group within the United States that is against Big Ag that is fighting for change in our own country and we want to be in solidarity with you as a leader in the agri-cology movement globally and work together to promote exchanges to channel resources to your work and so that's what we've been working on since then since 2015 and so every two years one of the things we do that I work closely with NILS on is the National Association of Small Farmers of Cuba which is a member of La Via Campesina organizes every two years a agri-cology encounter and we organize delegations from the United States mostly farmers but also academics and NGO representatives who go down and spend a week with farmers in Cuba learning from them really building relationships with them and it's an incredible experience I know how many of you in the room have been to that event so a few of you anybody who's interested please contact me or NILS we organize delegations usually it's every two years but now actually they're switching it to every year for this year it's going to be in October I believe the 22nd through the 27th but you can write to Royal Vermont or to us and we can get you the information soon we'll be advertising about it but that's one of the ways that we try and show solidarity and have this sort of people-to-people exchange and building relationships which is so important for U.S.-Cuba relations between our peoples and let me think about what else I wanted to share we also are since Cuba is going through one of the most difficult economic crises of their history right now because of a whole confluence of factors so after the Obama years of putting in several measures in place to make things easier for Cuba and for Cuba-U.S. relations Trump comes into power and puts in more than 240 measures which has completely strangled the economy including putting them on the state sponsor of terrorism lists which he did right before he left office in January 20 whatever it was that he left office and what that really does is it prevents Cuba from doing any banking transactions with any country in the world or extremely difficult so it just has made their economic situation very hard for the Cuban people I mean that's what Yorles was saying earlier sanctions don't really affect governments as much as they do the people of those countries and so there's been a major migration crisis in the past year I think it's 250,000 Cubans have left the country which is like 1% of the population it's a brain drain it's mostly the young the people who have more access to money to remittances to family who live abroad so it's draining the country of their best resources, their people and the list goes on and on of just the tragedies over the past year there was a hurricane in September that then blew out the whole electrical system across the country there are rolling blackouts that have been happening all year just this past week there were three national blackouts the entire country without electricity and you know after 12 hours they get it up again and then it goes down again and it's just the electrical system hasn't been maintained for many years and so they're working on that and that's because of the sanctions because they don't have access to the equipment and to the support to build their infrastructure there is a lightning strike that hit one of their main oil tankers off the coast in August I believe it was, or July and so they lost several million dollars of their oil reserves which then also contributes to the energy crisis so it's just a long list of terrible things that have happened over the past year but then you know along that just the sort of unleased potential of this incredible country they have a national climate change policy called Tareabida which is one of the most progressive climate policies in the world they passed a new constitution several years ago that mentions the climate crisis and the right to food and so has all of these incredible things in this new constitution that went through this very long participatory process of engagement with the population to give feedback to the constitution until it was passed I believe it was in 2020 and they just passed two years ago a national plan for food sovereignty and nutritional education and along with that a food sovereignty law and an agroecology law that will be coming out in a few months so just a number of these policies that are very progressive that are around decentralizing power and really trying to create a more sustainable and prosperous Cuba so we engage with researchers and farmers in Cuba to help support them as leaders of their change that they want to see in their country and one of the things that we have been doing recently especially sparked by the hurricane was developing a solidarity fund and like hurricane relief fund so if any of you are interested in contributing to that I think actually Molly had printed out a QR code that you can take a picture of to donate to and so what we did actually two things when we did the encounter in November beforehand me and Nils were talking with the National Association of Small Farmers and we really wanted to support them and bring a donation so the 80 or so people that came in the delegation everybody brought like bags of seeds and tools and toiletries and medicines and it was actually the first time that we brought a big donation to give to the farming families there so it was a beautiful you know muestra how do you say show of solidarity and love to our partners there and then we also raised funds and purchased ten thousand dollars worth of tejas roofs and beds for the families in the Rio that had lost their homes in the hurricane and so now because you know given the fact that hurricanes are going to continue to come and economic crisis is so deep we've you know set up this solidarity fund to continue to provide support to partners in Cuba and then I think finally is around pushing for policy change here in the United States and you know Biden has not done very much since I think he was waiting for the midterm elections to pass and see you know he had to appease the Cuban Americans in Florida it's really the Cuban Americans that are holding hostage this this policy and so now that that's happened there seems to be more of a of hope and opening for him to actually make some change and next month March 15th and 16th there's a national campaign that some solidarity groups are organizing to call the White House to ask for taking Cuba off of the state's sponsor of terrorism lists so we can share that with all of you if you've signed up on the shared your emails on the list then through rural Vermont we can share that campaign and certainly there will be opportunities for signing on to letters and I imagine the next few months there's going to be a lot more movement around pushing Biden to make some change on the clipboards over there and so I think that's all I'm going to share now unless I forgot anything but I really want to hear from all of you also any ideas or questions or how you would want to get engaged or what you've done in the past if you've been to Cuba and yeah just open it up to you all so I'm really interested about Biden's new policy so just recently he opened visas and people from Cuba can come here now for the first time like from Nicaragua Cuba and Haiti yeah so that's something I mean that's a pretty big deal and I know you said that he didn't he hasn't really done anything but when Obama was working with Raul in 2014 one of the things he did was take away the amnesty policy from the Clinton administration wet foot, dry foot and when Trump reversed all the other stuff he left that one in place so Cubans haven't had any kind of like amnesty policy in this country since then and so this is kind of a huge big deal so if you can sponsor somebody now from Cuba to come here you just have to pay for their plane ticket if they have a place to be and you're responsible for them for just two years unlike the immigration where you're responsible for them until citizenship and it's a fairly easy process from my understanding and so that's something I'm looking like I'm trying to do right now like I don't make enough money to sponsor somebody but you can combine incomes to sponsor somebody I'm looking for like an organization that houses people and can have them work pretty much everyone I know is Spanish speaking solely and all you know so I have friends in Cuba and then I have Cuban friends living here who basically came here as non-English speakers but I don't know if maybe anybody here knows of any of these like jobs or organizations that do house people coming here because it's like an amnesty it's like an amnesty program not like a regular path to citizenship do you know about this program? I haven't kept like I know I haven't followed the deep analysis behind it this recent one what I and I'm interested in Nils's and your leases take on it because it involves Nicaragua also but you know it's a tricky situation because it basically is it's helping Cubans leave the country and our work is around supporting Cubans who want to stay in Cuba and build the sovereign country that they've been struggling to do for the past 60 plus years and it's not to say I have many Cuban friends who have left the island and many who are here so my take on it is these are very personal individual choices and so our organization does not have any program like that because we work in Cuba and not with Cubans who are immigrating to the United States medicine but that's very new and that's because of the economy you could always bring in medicine to Cuba very limited amounts of medicine when I used to travel they would just go through if you had a price tag on something it would charge you it is easier to bring in the Cuban government has lifted the limits of things that you can bring in you could bring in larger quantities if you had a partnership with the Cuban organization who was going to be taking it whether it be a civil society organization or a government organization and you had that partnership set up then you could bring in larger amounts but as an individual they were had smaller quantities I have found different ways of being able to just send stuff and send medicine and send money and that kind of thing so I know that the government has a lot more leads with that kind of thing but I also know that you manage to find things it's like buy roofing but when they know how things can access roofing they start to find buildings on the island the scarcity is huge yeah it's almost like when you have to be connected with organizations to do that that's a different question then then sponsoring people to come in so getting resources to Cuba the way we've done that is through third countries because there aren't enough beds or roofs in Cuba there isn't a manufacturing place there so it's usually brought in from Panama from Mexico or from the United States but that's why I'm trying to leave it's because of the scarcity of what's on the island are you trying to are you trying to bring those sort of things to the island I mean if they don't have you're working specifically with farmers so that material donation that one was for hurricane relief and other types of donations that we've done have been material things for farmers and for projects that we're collaborating with so it could be seeds, tools we did a tractor we did solar panels we did irrigation system we did chainsaws leaf mulchers wheel barrows a whole slew of materials for farming for farmers just to add that there's it gets pretty nasty when you look into US policy towards Cuba and if any of you have ever spoken to US officials about Cuba there's so much hatred coming out of them it's really terrifying you just want to run but part of this change in the end of the wet foot, dry foot policy the law had basically said any Cuban who gets to US soil by any means is on the path towards permanent residency and so the US has been trying to provoke a migration crisis from Cuba for decades and since the pandemic that policy has become successful in a way that had never been successful in the past and so there's actually hundreds of thousands of Cubans leaving by any means they can right now and it's their brightest, youngest most hardworking people who are leaving because they're not getting what they need and it's a tragedy for Cuba it's a big boon for the architects of US foreign policy who are really excited about it the State Department is absolutely thrilled Jake Sullivan is absolutely thrilled and one of the things that has changed since the wet foot, dry foot policy is no longer in place is that Cubans who do come to the United States illegally get a deportation hearing but it's set for about two years after they arrive and to avoid going back to Cuba they have to show that they would be potentially under threat for political repression if they were to go back in other words they have to participate in the social media campaign to defame Cuba and so what this means is that people who are living in Cuba and somebody from their block leaves or friend from high school leaves then they see this person on social media as part of the US sponsored campaigns to ridicule, to make fun of to demolish Cuba on the networks and so that's part of the praxis of the United States is to demoralize and destroy Cuban resilience and it hasn't worked for decades right now it's working pretty well in this moment it might not work forever but also the Cuban Revolution might not last forever so it's a very very difficult moment for Cuba and there's been a combination of factors there was a refinery fire that destroyed a lot of Cuba's capacity to store fuel oil to have electricity to provide electricity to the population there was a hurricane last year the pandemic and before that there was a reunification of the currency which led to an inflation crisis so the economic crisis is very real and the policy to undermine and destroy Cuba's sovereignty is very very real as well are there people who will see Didi's hand and I love this opportunity like any experiences you've had any questions thoughts yeah I just want to speak to I've been to Cuba twice and the first time was when this guy was running around like that in Cuba and we went we went without any program I just wanted to see a country that had succeeded in its revolution before it failed it's my interesting going it was interesting because we called the state departments can we go and they said you can go and I said can I bring my son I'm going for research can I bring my son because he's still nursing they said well you can bring him and I said can you give me a piece of paper saying no so we went through Canada and and for me that trip was just a complete game changer in my suddenly being able to see capitalism in my own brain and we weren't even there for that long we were there maybe 10 days or so and to spend 10 days where there was really nothing to buy and this was in 1998 so it was during this special period like really hard I had lived in New York I was like oh yeah we're going to have I had all these things I wanted to eat there and it was like no it was like hot dogs and spam and that was it and so but the generosity of the people we stayed with we stayed with family of friends of friends and at that point was a holistic healthcare provider and found these clinics that were just unbelievable what they were doing like the clinic in Matanzas that had like 50 different practitioners of every kind of alternative and but just I'm just we'll never forget that feeling for the next especially few years after that of coming home and being able to see capitalism in a way that I couldn't see when I'm swimming in it and I had never been out of it so yeah I just have a huge love for the country and I just want to express that part there's lots more I could say from my head but I wanted to say that from my heart I guess I have a question for you two I went to Cuba twice actually during the Trump administration just bringing my kids there as a vacation vacation and met some family and became very good friends with the family and we are in close contact and I used to be able to send things down to them we went and traveled again to visit them for a 10 day period and then it seemed like from the pandemic on they stopped allowing us to send packages down there just you know simple things and I call the post office and they say nope you still can't send to Cuba you were saying that you send lots of things down there recently yeah it cost me a fortune and it's tricky and you know I had to find all these different like I know a guy who works at the Miami airport who flies packages to Santiago and then they pick them up and I pay you know Miami and then I pay depending on if it's medicine or clothing or whatever by the you know Kila whatever and then they send it from there so it's a process you know when I first started going to Cuba which was like 10 years ago it would take 3-4 months for a letter to get there so it's changed everything has changed from 10 years ago to now no you can send through there's a number of places in Florida but you can't send stuff that you buy here but you can buy stuff online so lots of different things food, medicine air conditioners like a lot there's I can share a couple of the places but you can't send your own like you know I used to be able to though unless it's just through people people who go down I'm surprised that the post worked though it did before that has like come and gone over the years just as like working and not working so I'm surprised it worked so recently no I mean for me it hasn't worked since the pandemic it seemed like they stopped it and then I kept expecting things to open up again and I keep calling and they say no Cuba's still on block and I know they're struggling yeah and I'd love to help them yeah there's a number of companies in Florida that buy online see Evan's hand I know after eight o'clock we can get a few more experiences and shares thanks so much for what you all have shared I would love to hear a bit about where you stand with regards to Cuba's government part of my narrative as an American was growing up was all about their lack of First Amendment and the potential authoritarian nature of things there when I traveled there I was expecting to kind of have that disproven but I think in some ways it was kind of affirmed by my experience some lack of dissent or lack of possibility for that there so I'd love to hear it sounds like maybe there's some decentralization of power going on but I'd love to hear how things are with that and how your organizations relate to it because I find myself feeling in full solidarity with the people there but also some complexity around the government being a representation of the people and the extent to which that organism can actually respond to its people and change and if you just want to speak on that a little bit I'd appreciate that I think it's a good question there's a there's some of the I think that some of the bases some of the bases on which the Cuban Revolution represented an immediate emancipation for a vast majority of Cuba's people but not all of them in 1959 belonged to a world of the past some of those bases so for example while it's fair to say that the Cuban Revolution represented an immediate emancipation for people of color in Cuba and for women in Cuba it did not represent the same thing for the LGBT community and that was actually something that happened years and years later and part of the narrative around the Cuban Revolution is really to focus on sort of it's immediate and all embracing positive impact and I think that as people who are part of the Cuban process and who visit and in dialogue with Cubans who are there there's clearly an understanding that for example the ecological component was almost not present until 1990 right and so understanding it more as a process and as a process where there's the first premise of the process is that it has to keep existing if it's going to continue to do anything and to exist has been to put unity above some kinds of dialogue so like for example the the formula that Fidel Castro said which was within the revolution anything goes anything you want to talk about right any problem any contradiction but if it's outside of the revolution nothing right so the idea of how do we make the change that we want part of a revolutionary process within a revolution and I think what they now say in Cuba is that there's a majority of people who support the revolution not everyone and I remember around 2008 a big effort to sort of foment dissenting opinions and to create sort of a like an op-ed section of the grandma newspaper where people could write in and there's been more and more and more of that so people can complain about power outages can complain about corrupt officials there's a lot more sort of space for sort of whistleblowing kinds of work and there's also sort of the argument that there's two arguments one is that if the US would stop undermining the process then there would be more first amendment kind of rights opening and the second is that there is a fundamental belief in human rights being social in nature and not individual in nature so that was kind of the the idea level discussion that the Cuban government proposed at the time of this signing of an agreement of sort of an end to the hostilities at the end of 2014 would be let's get in a big debate with the United States about the difference between social rights and individual rights and that debate never happened the blockade was never lifted and Donald Trump was elected so I do hear what you're saying there's like definitely within ANAP the Cuban small farmer movement you're not going to find somebody who's against the Cuban revolution you won't but arriving there as a student I always actually felt like I met more diversity of opinions that I had ever found in the United States in terms of politics like people were all over from libertarians to people who felt like the revolution had never met its promise to those who were more orthodox party liners there was just an extraordinary amount of articulate and diverse voices that I ran into right away as a student in Cuba so I think it depends where you look but there's certainly like there's a big emphasis on unity that can lead to a lack of conversation for sure so as you said I grew up in Nicaragua but I studied in Cuba and when I arrived the dormitories there were students from over 100 countries so there were people from every country of Africa and Latin America and what we all had in common is that we came from the popular classes the poor neighborhoods and the history of the Congo is the same history as Brazil the same history as the global south this you can't see if you don't understand that there is a colonial conflict very rooted in the minds of all between the north and the south relationship and so when we were there and we saw that the story of Congo is the same as the story of Brazil that was very powerful for us enormous hatred around Cuba and the disinformation around it is because of Cuba's disproportionate role in human history because there's many independent struggles in Africa that were successful thanks to Cuban support in that residence where we lived all the young Cubans who studied free in the university that everyone spoke English and French at the age of 18 that everyone had decent houses at that time several years ago 15 years ago they were opponents to the Cuban government and all those who came from the neighborhoods of the global south loved Cuba so what we found in our dorms was that all of the Cuban youth who had gone to school for free their whole lives and had a full ride scholarship at the university and all of them who had dignified housing and who had already learned to play the violin and speak French they were opposition to the Cuban government and all of us who came from other countries from poor neighborhoods we felt like we had arrived at a paradise and what happened was that it was that context but now what I want to tell you with colonialism is that I remember when the invasion of Libya and we were like 20 nations we were eating at the university and the news came out that the global north with Laotan invaded because they wanted oil and we stopped and there several students from Germany say we have to defend Libya and we stopped in Latin America and we said let them do what they want to do because there is an international principle a right that is called free determination of the people that each one does and believes it is convenient and there is the violation of self determination and so there is no justification for NATO to invade Libya so I think the point is that you can't base rights in universal rights but on military power the remittances that migrants send to Nicaragua since four years ago when the United States put sanctions on Nicaragua you people have gone from paying half a percent on what they send to Nicaragua to paying something like 12% so it cuts enormously on how people can support their families so so imperialist power works that way where they try to name a contradiction within a revolutionary process and then force that contradiction to exist so the fundamental part that we can take away from that is that Cubans have the right to determine their own free speech movement it's not a U.S. free speech movement in Cuba, it's their free speech movement and recognizing that I'm just saying that this is a revolution, it's not a revolution it's a big thing I mean I don't really feel my mother in law fought for her maestro with Castro it was a very well calculated thing and the U.S. was with the richest people because they sucked all the money out because of no infrastructure and why all the buildings they were crumbling and they have no place and where are they going to go from here so people wanted to leave the country which they're not allowed to do I mean how's that saying like it makes sense in that context to take away the blockade then do you see if that had any good impact absolutely seems like that's more our role is what we're trying to say morally ambiguous to tell people oh yes that was a revolution sorry you can't leave the island sorry you have no food and your house is falling apart but I mean it wasn't really a revolution how's that a revolution for them on the patista how does that work the dictatorship under patista under fidel it was all the same there was literally people dying of family and under fidel people were still dying and now they're dying again and now it's we're going back actually dying their life expectancy in maternal or some of them they had to do it a little bit okay another dictatorship is better than the other dictatorship why not this is definitely there are many truths in Cuba I have been going there for the past 25 years you're married to a Cuban or whatever everybody has many different experiences there what I can tell you is that it is a centrally planned economy so you're not allowed to leave you are allowed to leave people might not have the resources you purchased a ticket to leave and it's because it depends who you are it depends where you're going Cubans can fly to Nicaragua without a visa yes they can now so in the 1990s in the 1990s they had to get a two weeks ago in the 1990s it was very difficult today anybody can leave but people aren't able to because they don't have the resources so that's not because the government is limiting yeah I mean you have that education like you said you're giving this education and you're giving books and you have all this stuff that those people want to explore the world they want that they've learned like I have this that I have no one and in the United States we have no education we have no healthcare we have no science but we're also free to go to Cuba and be like oh isn't this nice and I will say the richness what the education system what the revolution has done for the level of education for the people in Cuba I'm sure you've seen that right you had an incredible conversation with any country on the street and what that has done for the scientists in the country and their influence on policy I mean the climate change policy that they have their national level is definitely for the region and it's because these politicians yeah there are politicians who are like like are just blockheads definitely I can't explain that because carbon emissions are crazy because the cars are from you know out of nowhere I'm just going to pull it back for a minute because we're going to look back and forth and I think part of what I just heard Niels say as well as part of the truth we're trying to hold here is that this isn't about saying the United States or the Cuban government or those political systems are perfect or are the the ideal form we're talking about building bridges of solidarity between the peoples and our places and we're talking about what works and what doesn't work what causes harm and what doesn't cause harm and sharing experiences of our with people in these different places and across these different places and we're going to have different opinions in different ways and I think I'm going to say two things real quick because we're a little over and we have to be out here by 9 but let's keep this conversation going for people who want to stay does anyone want to sort of respond or have a time in this sort of dialogue or to share your experiences to expand this a little bit because we just got into a little bit of a particular type of conversation here I see two I see Carl and I see Sophia I mean sort of related to that but like in terms of like the whole hiatus and this country versus that country and like who's right who's wrong I'm wondering if there's like Cuban small farmer movement and like education if there's any like grassroots projects or programs happening to help regenerate the soils down there so that they can start sustaining their own food so that they can start teaching each other how to come together like I understand the capitalism whole part of that but like for young people like is there a way that they can be taught how to grow their own food how to grow more carbon and not have to deal with the effects of climate change that they're dealing with now and I know that there's what Nils is doing is like and what you're doing is kind of like a project like that but if there's any more and how they can collaborate with other projects across different regions and so forth which is kind of like in tandem to or tangent to what they were talking about but anyway do any of you want to speak directly to that or anybody logically right you're speaking anyone else what does the agroecological movement look like what does agriculture look like and kubais see hand bones hand we just we went down there because um so they could teach us about that in sofia because uh another I met this Japanese ambassador and the Japanese were like in in there investigating how you guys made the most amazing agroecological system in the world because they had two so it was kind of twisted right here's the United States who smashed the human economy forced them to reinvent agroecological systems because they had no inputs and then we went down there like a bunch of tourists on a safari to look at right but this irony was not lost on the kubans one of the things that they said to us was we have solidarity with the people of the United States even if the U.S. government went to scumbags they were very nuanced about that and it was a lot of really interesting heartbreaking political and social conversations but the reason why we went down there is because to see agroecological systems that you can't see anywhere on the planet so we have that question around agroecology Carl do you want to say your question Margarita just has me gather a few questions and then we can sort of respond to them as a group thank you so I'm curious about what drives policy and policy changes in Cuba I haven't checked in in Cuba for a while now but as I understand it there have been no elections since the revolution so people are not decision makers are not responsible to an electorate agroecology policies made if there are climate change policies progressive climate change policies put into the constitution or pass nationally who makes those decisions what are the pressures on them to do so so we have a question around political process around agroecology and agriculture in Cuba does anyone want to add anything else to the sort of last bit of bringing in some questions Didi I have a variation on the agroecology question because both times that I've gone there was an extreme lack of food and at the same time I hear a lot about the extreme successes in agroecology and I'm wondering is the food mostly going to rural areas so that you don't see so much of it in the supermarket or are they just not able yet to provide that much food sovereignty so what's the relationship between the successes of agroecology and the food shortages there alright well leave it there because that's three good questions some interrelated do you want to start you're looking at me this question comes up always is this paradox of Cuba's agriculture system because they are this leader in agroecology but they're in this chronic food crisis and the simplest answer to that is that no matter what type of agricultural system you're trying to implement in a country that is experiencing severe structural and economic crises systemic crises you're not going to be able to be successful with an industrial system or an agroecological system and so there just isn't the economic structure in place for it to succeed there's extreme scarcity of everything basic things like boots, machetes small tractors processing equipment there's a lot of food waste because there isn't refrigeration their transportation system is terrible there's no gas and you know it's like sort of goes up and down these fluctuations since the special period really before the special period things were much better because there was this relationship with the socialist block and so there weren't these food issues so it's only since the special period and as things get better like in the early 2000s and then fertilizers and pesticides are brought in and then the food situation gets a little bit better so there's a complexity of issues there for why they aren't able to produce more and have less food waste so then to these policy changes the one on the national plan for food sovereignty and nutritional education which was passed two years ago it's geared towards you know limiting the importation of food substituting food imports with increased production on the islands through a decentralization of management plans for food production and so the way that that law that or that national plan was passed was with participation of 13 different ministries across the islands and like 15 research institutes and like 10 civil society organizations that around a two year process went to communities across the islands and gathered input around what do you want your food system to look like what do you how do you want to have changes in access to food and so collecting through this process then built this plan and you know some of our colleagues have been building this plan and drafting the laws and yeah that's that's how these laws have been drafted it's not by five people at the head of the country and the same with the climate change law so that's my brief answer and I don't know if Nils wants to add anything or there is a very big crisis of pollinators because the bees represent the indicator for me of the ecological transition yesterday I was in a meeting of Cuban and Nicaraguan beekeepers having a zoom call together and as you all know across the planet pollinators are in crisis right there's a colony decline it's rampant and much of it has to do with pesticides and and for us on the Nicaraguan side it was shocking because when we started to talk about the indicators of our hives the hives in Cuba were doing much better they were more or less producing twice as much honey and they weren't experiencing the same loss their queens were in better health all of the indicators that we used to establish sort of the parameters of this crisis in bee raising the Cubans were in a vastly better situation so beyond the the other indicators that some of you might be mentioning for us just the the importance of a social ecological and a social and a social and a social and a a social ecological indicator of that depth in what it means to build healthy landscapes meant a great deal to us to see that bees are doing well in Cuba maybe that combines a little bit of these questions about economics and politics and culture okay so there was a there were two agrarian reforms in Cuba in the early 1960s actually one started in 59 and the other was in 63 and so the first one created a massive cooperative sector of small farmers with their own land and the second one created a state farm sector that started to have a lot of the land and operate it as public companies and so that vast amount of land that was operated as public companies went into crisis when the Soviet Union fell and it had no access to inputs and it has never been able to pick itself back up and that sector had 80% of the land 80% of the farm land in 1990 the small farming sector which had at the time less I think it had like 11 percent of the land in 1990 now it's up to maybe like 25% of the land has been where this big agro-logical success has happened and that's because people had not forgotten their roots in the peasant traditions of using oxen to plow the land of saving seeds of trading seeds and of using beneficial plants and a number of agro-logical practices were already in place and so when that sector started to show some promise it was given a little bit more space to experiment and they created something called the farmer to farmer movement in Cuba taking as a model the farmer to farmer movements from Central America and when that happened there was an exponential growth in the number of farmers who started to use alternative agriculture practices and who started to talk about agro-cology so now over half of the farms in the country are aware of their own they work their farms in an agro-logical transition process and so some of them still have only a few crops others have dozens of crops but they understand themselves to be in an agro-logical transition process which means integrating livestock with crops with trees and creating sometimes very small scale agro industry producing their own cheese or producing their own guava jam on farm or toasting their own coffee this kind of thing and yeah it's about half of Cuban farms now which means about 150,000 farms out of 300,000 that's the rural side of agro-cology and Margarita can tell us about the urban side of agro-cology in Cuba in response to the special period with the lack of petroleum and the food crisis there is this social movement burgeoning in response and so this creation of urban farms and then the state began to support that and so 20, 30 years later there is a national program for urban and suburban agriculture and it really changed Cuban's diet because Cuban's diet is rice, beans, pork and then maybe a little bit of tomato or lettuce and so what the root crops but with the urban ag sort of movement did was diversify the diet and bring in a lot more vegetables and in terms of education every province has a university and then every municipality has a university center that's connected with that provincial university and there are agricultural programs that are training local people about ecological practices and so there was a request to finish this event with a song and I have not forgotten and it's way over time here we could probably be talking all night but can I I think our people who were going to lead us in song left Margarita doesn't have any we'll see who comes back I don't know any Cuban songs but I will maybe I'll say well your least did you have something you were thinking of when there was a request Margarita, can you help me to close before we leave we are going to close this space and can we stand please we are going to thank you although we have the right and the left for having come thank ourselves, thank everybody for having come and we are going to say a word that we have on the right and on the left we are going to say we have a difference I accompany you in your dream for me to want community is to share dreams so we are going to do it to the right and the left and I last I just want to say Margarita didn't speak specifically to some of these programs but these are really accessible exchange programs that they've been running with an op in Cuba and I encourage people to inquire about them really unique opportunities and she spoke to some fundraising efforts too for mutual aid and please be in touch if you're interested in any of those things and thank you all very much thank you for bringing food and sharing yourselves and thank you Orca Media for the setup and recording