Cuba community action
The aim of this page is to recognise, celebrate and encourage the self-empowerment of community agency networks (CANs) and community groups' activism for climate, environment and many other sustainability topics across Cuba.
News
The dream to restore a special forest taking root in the high Andes, news.mongabay.com (Feb 14, 2025) - Latin America is moving fast to protect democracy from excesses of big tech, theconversation.com (Feb 11, 2025)
- Study shows large social disparities in neighborhood flooding within Latin American cities, nature.com (Feb 10, 2025) — Policymakers must prioritize flood adaptation and recovery efforts in neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status
- ‘Global weirding’: climate whiplash hitting world’s biggest cities, study reveals, theguardian.com (Mar 12, 2025)
- Only seven countries worldwide meet WHO dirty air guidelines, study shows, theguardian.com (Mar 11, 2025) — Governments could clean their air with policies such as funding renewable energy projects and public transport; building infrastructure to encourage walking and cycling; and banning people from burning farm waste.
- Many cities are banning ads for airlines, SUVs and fossil fuels – and yours could be next, theconversation.com (Mar 10, 2025)
Food activism
Cuba's agrarian revolution originated in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra when Law No. 3 of the Rebel Army was formally proclaimed in October of 1958. The principle of the law: Land should be given to those who tilled it; with the goal of massive land distribution.
The first Agrarian Reform Law was enacted on May 17, 1959. The second Agrarian Reform Law was enacted in October of 1963. These laws made the agricultural systems of Cuba socialist. Agricultural production cooperatives began in 1975, and were enacted August 24, 1982, as a superior form of collective production of social property started after the farmers' decision to join their lands and other means of production.[1]
The first agrarian reform created cooperatives and then consolidating agricultural production in state farms. The second created the agricultural production cooperatives (CPAs) and the third was the 1993 law creating UBPCs. These abbreviations come from the Spanish names.[2]
Video archive
- Cuba's DIY Inventions from 30 Years of Isolation on youtube
News archive
2009-2016
- Why So Many Havana Residents Grow Their Own Food, Jan 29, 2016...CityLab
- The farmer who's starting an organic revolution in Cuba, August 31, 2015...The Guardian
- Guardians of Cuba's urban green spaces, by Elaine Diaz...Global Voices Online, November 1, 2011.
- Sustainable Medicine, Cuba and Peak oil...off-grid.net, Oct 20, 2009.
About Cuba
According to a 2012 study, Cuba is the only country in the world to meet the conditions of sustainable development put forth by the WWF.
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the northern Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean meet. Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico), south of both Florida and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic), and north of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Havana is the largest city and capital. Cuba is the third-most populous country in the Caribbean after Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with about 10 million inhabitants. It is the largest country in the Caribbean by area.
The territory that is now Cuba was inhabited as early as the 4th millennium BC, with the Guanahatabey and Taíno peoples inhabiting the area at the time of Spanish colonization in the 15th century. It was then a colony of Spain, through the abolition of slavery in 1886, until the Spanish–American War of 1898, when Cuba was occupied by the United States and gained independence in 1902. In 1940, Cuba implemented a new constitution, but mounting political unrest culminated in the 1952 Cuban coup d'état and the subsequent dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The Batista government was overthrown in January 1959 by the 26th of July Movement during the Cuban Revolution. That revolution established communist rule under the leadership of Fidel Castro. The country was a point of contention during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into nuclear war. During the 1970s, Fidel Castro dispatched tens of thousands of troops in support of Marxist governments in Africa. According to a CIA declassified report, Cuba received $33 billion in Soviet aid by 1984. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced a severe economic downturn in the 1990s, known as the Special Period. In 2008, Fidel Castro retired after 49 years; Raúl Castro was elected his successor. Raúl Castro retired as president in 2018 and Miguel Díaz-Canel was elected president by the National Assembly following parliamentary elections. Raúl Castro retired as First Secretary of the Communist Party in 2021 and Díaz-Canel was elected.
References