What Havana Can Teach Us About Resilient Cities

Food doesn’t have to travel. It can grow where we live.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost most of its imported fuel, fertilisers, and food. Faced with crisis, they didn’t panic, they planted.

Abandoned lots, rooftops, and schoolyards were transformed into organopónicos, urban gardens fed with compost, tended by hand, and rooted in community. Today, Havana grows over 50% of its vegetables within city limits, and recieves approximately only 16% of its food as imports from abroad.

They don’t use apps or drones or vertical farms, just soil, sweat, and shared knowledge.

It’s a reminder: we don’t need perfect conditions. We need community, courage, and compost.

If they could do it under embargo, what might we grow under relative abundance?

Imagine a rooftop turned food forest. A neighbourhood kraut shed. A school where every child knows how to plant, preserve, and pass it on.

Start small. Plant herbs outside the library. Ask your council about edible landscaping. Offer your garden as a shared plot.

Why does it matter if local communities can grow their own food?

Because it makes us resilient. It gives us agency. It brings back flavour, culture, and connection.

Food grown close to home is fresher, more nutritious, and often grown with care, for soil, pollinators, and people. It reduces reliance on fragile supply chains and turns passive consumers into active stewards. And perhaps most importantly, it puts nutrition back in the hands of people who care about nutrition over profit.

But more than anything, it reminds us that we can shape our world. With a handful of seeds and some shared effort, we become part of something regenerative, delicious, and real.

That’s why.

The food revolution doesn’t need permission or protests, it needs people willing to grow.

Start small, start today.

- Sam

#TheBlackButterClub