To the right lay revolutionary tomatoes and to the left lay revolutionary lettuces, while in the glass in my hand, filled to the brim and frothing with vitality, was the juice from revolutionary mangoes. It was thick, unfiltered and fabulously sweet. It was also organic.
"Yes, it is very good. It's all natural," said Miguel Salcines Lopez, his brow dotted with sweat from the midday sun, as he raised a glassful to his lips. "Growing food in this way is much more interesting. It is much more intelligent."
Almost five decades after the now ailing Fidel Castro and his comrades overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista and seized power in Cuba, another revolution, largely unnoticed by most visitors and tourists, is well under way on this Caribbean island. And Salcines and his small urban farm at Alamar, an eastern suburb of the capital, Havana, are at the center of a social transformation that may turn out to be as important as anything else that has been achieved during Castro's 47 years in power.
Spurred into action by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous effect this had on its subsidized economy, the government of Cuba was forced to take radical steps to feed its people. The solution it chose -- essentially unprecedented both within the developed and undeveloped world -- was to establish a self-sustaining system of agriculture that by necessity was essentially organic.
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