BIKE: Kunstler on the future [Cuba]

[Eric Anderson]

Folks:
 
Cuba has been an amazing example in the area of sustainability. Friends of mine in both organic farming and bicycling movements have visited on "educational" trips, and returned recharged and inspired. Cuba's experience with the end of Soviet aid, and the likewise continuation of the trade embargo by the United States, might make us all dream for another OPEC oil embargo, $4.50/gal gasoline, the end of oil?
 
In 2000 and 2001, we screened during bike month the documentary film, help me here folks, "Velorution, the bicycle in Cuba"???. Yellow Bike screened this as well at a 2002 community bike conference here in Austin. Cuba's embrace of the bicycle has also been written on considerably in the alternative press over the past decade, including Tikkun, In Context, Mother Jones, Utne Reader etc. More recently, the Toronto Globe published an assessment of Cuba's embrace of the bicycle. Our very own Bikes Across Borders has sent and accompanied at least one shipment of bikes to Cuba.
 
In the eighties, before the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba recieved some bicycles/tools through Bikes not Bombs. These bikes were part of material aid shipments that the Peace/anti-interventionist community were somehow able to get around Reagan's trade embargo.
 
Likewise, Cuba has embraced organic agriculture. For ten years now, Cuba, and its higly trained scientific community have been pioneering highly specilaized pest-management techniques not reliant on Monsanto gene-splicing, but an intimate knowledge of biology, climate, and traditional breeding techniques. Many of America's organic farmers look toward Cuba for ideas how the United States may wean itself from our own "Soviet" agricultural system. For more insight here, see: "Cuba, The Greening of the Revolution", or ask me for my copy.
 
Bicyclists as well should look to Cuba perhaps for ideas how we may wean the world from our terrible addiction to the automobile.
 
Viva la bicyclette! Viva la velo-revolucion!
 
Eric

elizabeth gray <egray88> wrote:
>The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones
>surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally
>sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion.

The April edition of Harper’s magazine has a fascinating article about 
Cuba’s sustainability progress in the years since the Soviet Union stopped 
sending them grain for their cows, and gasoline and parts for their 
tractors. They were forced to go organic and non-mechanical in a big way, 
leveraging the highly educated population to figure out how to do it in the 
most efficient and effective way. Supposedly average caloric intake dropped 
immediately after the fall by about one third, and they are now back to 
previous caloric levels.

Elizabeth Gray
egray88
974-4150 work
476-1861 home



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Eric Anderson <bikeeric>
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