 So, my name is Graham Unix-Rufinacte. No, no, no, no. 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 of 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 that we're 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. Oh. And to love our children in one another. Hello, Balamanwili. 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... 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 Ilu, if I pronounce that correctly, and La Via Campesina. Yorlis has been a community organizer and popular educator since she was 12 years old. She's an agroecologist, beekeeper, and herbalist. Thank you, Yorlis. Nils McKeown has supported international delegations of La Via Campesina in visits to Cuba since 2013. He is staff support for La Via Campesina 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. Again, thank you all for coming. With that, I'm going to hand this over to Yorlis and Nils. Muchas gracias a todos por venir. Vamos a comenzar con un ejercicio. Nos ponemos de pie, por favor. Can everybody stand up? We're going to start with an exercise together. Y vamos a estirarnos un poco, estirar nuestro cuerpo, respirar. Stretching a little bit. Stretch your body. Take a deep breath. Feel the awareness of your feet upon the floor. Being aware of the space that we're in. Being aware of one another. And the others around us. Move your arms a little bit because it's cold. So let's stay standing for a couple more minutes because these days there's so much work that people do sitting down. So we're going to do a round of saying our names and in only one word, why we're here. Just one word. 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 Didi and I'm here for Cuba. Sofia and Connexion. Rocío and Community. Me llamo Piona y estoy aquí para curiosidad. I'm Melissa, I'm here for curiosity. My name is Graham and I am here for Connexion. My name is Cathy 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. You have to tell us either like a saying from Vermont or like a local joke or something. Or a riddle. Someone helped 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, do without. Thank you Molly. My name is Carlos and I'm here because I wonder. Dvorah, 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. I almost put an extra word. 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. Shannon, 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. So you got to do like a riddle or a joke or something very Vermont saying anything that comes to you. 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. So if we connected community and connection, we have seven people saying the same thing. And if we had 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, just be at home by ourselves. Okay, so 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. You guys can be three together. We're looking into each other's eyes and seeing if we can feel what the person is feeling. Now we're going to try to guess. 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, emotions. How y'all doing? Need some more time? So it looks like at least a couple pairs have been able to guess what the other one's feeling. If you've been able to guess what the other person is feeling. 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 and resting at home? So we start to get an idea of what the person's feeling. Then we try to create a hypothesis of why the person's feeling. 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. Help me distribute those papers on all the tables. How are we doing? How are we doing? We're back to the big circle. We'll give you one more minute to close and come back to the... 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. But the mystic is life. It's about spirituality. How do we bring our full selves into this space? How do we 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, every feeling, emotions, how can we start to change that logic of capitalism, of capital? 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 egocentricism? And we start to put ourselves in minds and our hearts and in each other. So I put some pieces of paper folded up along the tables. I want you to open them up. Especially for those who have said that they were curious. There are 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. There's 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 immigrants 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 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 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 poor. I grew up trying to find working, just working, farming, and whatever I could move to places that I thought would be good, interesting, and I could find work, winter, 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 money. 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 is the one who wants to share what he felt with the image. So, I thought it would make 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, the president says. And I agree with that. There's no water? Don't do that. Well, the first thing I would like to say to the Spanish people is that women here, 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. When I sat and I feel like I have no hope by going to sit and look at the bees. If you go and watch the bees every morning, whether it's cold, sunny, raining, they go, and if they start sitting, sometimes I imagine them tired, but they keep going. 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 I feel like if we need to find that path to dialogue with plants and with others in those moments today, we could pray and it's not lost. That's why we're all here too, to offer our hearts. And so did 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 de-contextualized 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. 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 that news and in those images. And it's always good to ask 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 mystica to be able to think about more beyond here. So in the late 80s when in Nicaragua the revolution was... 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 and 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? And the answer is the Via Campesina, the farmer's path. So that's 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 migrants that are coming and they're coming because of the causes of the economic system in politics from the United States 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 equal distribution of resources. Does any of you have a private plane because we're going to ask you to leave if you do? It's not a situation that any 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 our natural resources. So there's a huge loss of just the way of life. That's one of the ways. 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 cruel sanctions against Cuba, against Nicaragua, against Venezuela for any country that says 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. And in all of this political, economic and social situation, the peasant movements, they keep on activating, they keep on moving. And the people too, to live with joy. 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. Nose in my... I'll just quickly say thank you, Yorlis. And thank you Niels 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. 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 that recommendation and end the event with a song. And for now I'm going to... I think pass it over to Niels to give us a little bit more context. Great. Thanks so much. And thank you Yorlis 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 Yorlis 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, but 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 Yorlis 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 Sandinista 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. And that 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 the 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, right, 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 sort of this, 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 Cudetan Honduras a series of efforts to overturn democratic processes in Latin America. After the Cudetan of Zalaya and Honduras, there was a parliamentary Cudetan 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 Cudetan Bolivia in 2019. Oh no, there's another one just last year. A few months ago the Cudetan Peru. And unfortunately the United States is behind every one of these, right? 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, right? 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, right? 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, right? Which has to do with the economic blockade of Cuba that John F. Kennedy started and 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. No. 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 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 agroecology 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 agroecology and food justice came together and said, we need to have a counterpoint to this group. And so we formed the Cuba U.S. Agroecology 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 agroecology 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 agroecology 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. So 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. And 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. You know, 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, you know, the list goes on and on of just the tragedies over the past year. There was, you know, 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 unleashed 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 $10,000 worth of tejas, roofs and beds for the families in Piran de 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 to the Cuban-Americans in Florida. It's really the Cuban-Americans that are holding hostage this policy. And so now that that's happened, there seems to be more 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-sponsored terrorism list. So we can share that with all of you. If you've signed up on the, shared your emails on the list, then through Royal Vermont, we can share that campaign. And certainly there will be opportunities for signing on to letters. And I imagine in the next few months, there's going to be a lot more movement around pushing Biden to make some change. Oh, the clipboard's over there. Yeah. 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 up 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 and 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 like 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, you know, 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 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 is in your list's take on it because it involves Nicaragua also. But, you know, it's a tricky situation because it basically is saying, 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 and these sort of things, but that's very new and that's because the economy is sort of crashing in on them. You could always bring in medicine to Cuba. Very limited amounts of medicine. Like when I used to travel, they would just go for it. 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 had smaller quantities. There are a lot of 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 is a lot more lenient to that kind of thing but I also know that you manage to find things to buy roofing, to buy it, but you know when they know how to access roofing and stuff like that, to find buildings and stuff like that. On the island. It's huge. It's almost like you have to be connected with organizations to do that. That's a different question than sponsoring people to come in. Getting resources to Cuba the way we've done that is through third countries because there aren't enough beds in Cuba. There isn't like a manufacturing place there. So it's usually brought in from Panama from Mexico or from the United States. But that's where people are trying to leave 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 that 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 like a whole slew of materials for farming for farmers. Yeah. Just to add that there's it gets pretty nasty when you look into US policy towards Cuba and when you if any of you have ever spoken to US officials about Cuba there's so much hatred coming out of them that it's it's really terrifying you just want to run right? But part of this change in the end of the wet foot dry foot policy right there 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 like hundreds of thousands of Cubans leaving by any means they can right now and that it's it's a you know 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 sort of the practice 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 it's a 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 hope I see Didi's hand it's an 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 which 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 I called the State Department and they said you can go and I said can I bring my son I'm going for research can I bring my son for nursing and they said well you can bring him and I said can you give me a piece of paper and no so we went through Canada and for me that trip was just a complete game changer in my suddenly being able to see capitalism in my own brain you know like 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 98 so it was during the special period like really hard I had lived in New York I was like oh yeah we're gonna have like you know 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 you know and so but the generosity of the people we stayed with we stayed with like family of friends of friends and I'm at that point was a holistic healthcare provider and found these clinics that were just unbelievable what they were doing 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 a 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 and it 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 and 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 called 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 they you know here to send it to Miami and then I pay depending on if it's medicine or clothing or whatever by the you know Kila or 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 to get a letter to get there so it's changed everything has changed from 10 years ago to now no no um you can send through there's a number of places in Florida that you can't send stuff that you buy here but you can buy something online and they send it so lots of different things food, medicine air conditioners like the doctors I can share a couple of the projects but you can't send your own like you know immediate start unless it's just through people yeah people who go down I'm surprised that the post worked though because that has like come and gone over the years just as like working and not working and working so I'm surprised it worked so recently 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 you know Cuba's still on go and I know they're struggling yeah and I'd love to help them yeah there's a number of companies in Florida creating 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 I was expecting to kind of have that disproven but I think in some ways it was kind of affirmed by my experience some you know 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 it 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 immediate emancipation for 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 right and as a process where there's the the first premise of the process is that it has to keep existing if it's gonna continue to do anything and to exist has been to put unity above some kinds of dialogue so like for example 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 that what they are now saying 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 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 right the blockade was never lifted and Donald Trump was elected so I do hear what you're saying there's like definitely within 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 you know people who felt like the revolution had never met its promise to those who were more orthodox party liner there was just an extraordinary amount of articulate and diverse voices that I ran into right away as a student in Cuba so I kind of I think it depends where you look but it's also there's certainly like there's a big emphasis on unity and that can lead to a lack of conversation for sure Yes, look from my experience I came from Nicaragua and studied in Cuba and lived there only where I lived we were more than 100 nations so she said I grew up in Nicaragua but I studied in Cuba and when I arrived to the dormitories there were students from over 100 countries we were from all over Africa all over Latin America and we were people from neighborhood people from popular classes poor people from working class so there were people from every country in America and what we all had in common is that we came from the popular classes the poor neighborhoods what's hard it would be hard for anyone to understand this if they don't see that there's a colonial conflict that's very rooted in the north-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 totally the story of America and the global south the independence of Africans were impossible without Cuba I tell you this to tell you the following that part of that colonial conflict and the disinformation there that influence everything is that in that residence where we lived all the young Cubans who studied for free at the university who spoke English and French at the age of 18 who all had decent houses at that time, a few years ago they were opposites to the Cuban government and all those who came from the neighborhoods from the global south loved Cuba 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 the news that the global north invades because they want oil and we stopped several students from Germany say we have to defend Libya and we stopped the latino-american 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 what he feels and believes that it is convenient and there is the violation the Americans stood up and said look there is something that is called free and sovereign will of the peoples or self determination there is no justification for NATO to invade Libya I can't go into your home and tell you how to clean your house so I think the point is that you can't base rights in universal rights in universal rights in universal rights in universal rights in universal rights in universal rights on on military power dollars for each 100 so imperialist power works that way where they try to name a contradiction within a revolutionary process and then force a contradiction to exist through economic and military means and 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 US free speech movement in Cuba it's their free speech movement my mother in law fought in the Sierra Maestro with Castro it was a very well calculated thing and Castro's were the richest people because they stuck all the money out of people no infrastructure why all the buildings they were crumbling and they have no life and where are they going to go from here so people wanted to leave the country which they're not a lot to do I mean how's that saying like next to take away the blockade then just to see if that had any impact absolutely there should not seems like that's more our role is what we're trying to say revolution seems really morally ambiguous to tell people oh yes that was a revolution sorry can't leave the island sorry you have no food your house is falling apart but I mean it wasn't really a revolution how's that a revolution for them there was one force before under Patista how does that work under Columbus under Patista under Fidel and all this under Patista there was literally people dying of family under Fidel people were still dying and now they're dying again and now it's we're going back actually dying again there are some of them they did take a little bit when they passed like six months so you're like ok another dictatorship is better than the other dictatorship why not I think 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 really planned economy so you're not allowed to leave you are allowed to leave people might not have the resources to purchase 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 out of Nicaragua yes in the 1990s it was very difficult today anybody can leave but people aren't able to because they don't have the resources they have no money so that's not because the government is limiting you have that education like you said you're giving this education and you're giving your books and you have all this stuff those people want to explore the world they want that they learn like I have this but I have no money so we can explore the world we have no education we have no health care I understand both sides of it but we're also free to go to Cuba and be like oh is it this way and I will say the richness what the education system what the government has done for the level of education for the people in Cuba I'm sure you've seen that right education with any country and what that has done the level of respect for the scientists in the country and their influence on policy I mean the climate change policy that they have their national level is for the region and it's because these politicians yes there are the politicians who are just blockheads definitely because I'm just going to pull it back for a minute because I I'm 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 for the the ideal form we're talking about building bridges of solidarity between the peoples and our places and focusing on 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 I'm not here by nine but let's keep this conversation going for people who want to stay or are willing to stay for at least a few more minutes um does anyone want to sort of respond or have a time in this sort of dialogue or in 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 Sofia it's I mean sort of related to that but like in terms of like status and this country versus that country and like who's right who's wrong I'm wondering if there's like in terms of Cuban small farmer movement and like education if there's any like grassroots projects or programs 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 sequester 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 what they were talking about but anyway do any of you want to speak directly to that or anybody in agri-ecologically right you're speaking what does the agri-ecological movement look like what does agriculture look like in Cuba I see hand bones hand we went down there because so they can teach us about that in Sofia because my brother met this Japanese ambassador and the Japanese were like in there investigating how Cuba has made the most amazing agri-ecological system in the world because they had two so it's kind of twisted right here's the United States we smashed the human economy forced them to reinvent agri-ecological systems because they had no inputs and then we went down there like a bunch of tourists on a safari to look at but this irony was not lost on the Cubans 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. governments went to scumbags they were very nuanced about that and it was a lot of really interesting heartbreaking political social conversations but the reason why we went down there is because to see agri-ecological systems that you can't see anywhere I'm going to, so we have that question around agri-ecology, Carl do you want to say your question? Marguerita just has to 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 so if there are agri-ecology policies made, if there are climate change policies progressive climate change policies put into the constitution or passed nationally who makes those decisions what are the pressures on them to do so so we have a question on the political process in Cuba, does anyone want to add anything else to the sort of last bit of bringing in some questions, Didi? my question is sort of a variation on the agri-ecology 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 agri-ecology 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 agri-ecology and the food shortages there we'll 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 they are this leader in agri-ecology 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 agri-ecological system it just isn't the economic structure in place for it to succeed there's extreme scarcity of everything some 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 it sort of goes up and down these fluctuations since the special period really before the special period things were there was this relationship with the socialist bloc 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 and when it comes 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 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 law that national plan was passed 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 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 we had a meeting yesterday I was in a meeting of of Cuban and Nicaraguan beekeepers having a zoom call together and as you all know across the island there is a big crisis because the bees represent the indicator for me of the ecological transition yesterday I was in a meeting of Cuban and as you all know across the planet pollinators are in crisis right there's a colony decline that's rampant and much of it has to do with pesticides 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 that 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 the bees 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 importance of a social ecological indicator of that depth in what it means to build healthy landscapes meant a great deal to us to see that that bees are doing well in Cuba maybe that combines a little bit of these questions about economics and politics and culture give us a little bit of the big picture like how much industrial sure so 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 operated 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 or 12% of the land in 1990 now it's up to maybe like 25% of the land has been where this big agricultural 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 agricultural 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 of 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 agriculture so now over half of the farms in the country are aware of their own they work their farms in an agricultural transition process and so some of them still have only a few crops others have dozens of crops but they understand themselves to be an agricultural 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 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-ecology and Margarita can tell us about the urban side of agro-ecology 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 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 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 yeah so there was a request to finish this event with a song that 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 are going to lead us in song left Margarita doesn't have any idea 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 for Margarita to close before we go we're going to close this space and we can't stand, please we're going to thank you we have the right and the left for coming thank ourselves, thank everybody for having come and we're going to say a word we have the right and the left we have a difference I accompany you in your dreams this opinion I accompany you in your dreams for me to want community is to share dreams so creating community is sharing dreams so we're going to do it to the three to the right or to the left even though we have differences we may share we may share we may share we may share I And now last I want to say, Margarita did not speak specifically to these programs these are really accessible exchange programs they have run in Kuba 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.