Tag: farm-restaurant

Cuban Agroecology Tour: Finca Agroecológica El Paraiso, Viñales

Here’s another post from my January 2020 group agroecology trip with Organic Growers’ School to Cuba. I’m posting about this sporadically as I organize my photos and journal.

Day 5 – Saturday January 11 lunch and afternoon

After visiting La Palma, a farm in Pinar del Rio province primarily growing tobacco, and Manolo Tobacco Farm to see cigars made, we went to a farm restaurant called La Finca Agroecologica el Paraiso. Wilfredo is the main farmer and his daughters are the main chefs.

The farm has 8.9 hectares, with 200 vegetable beds and 80% of the produce is sold through their restaurant, and 20% to hospitals etc (I think that is a legal requirement in Cuba). The restaurant is at the top of the hill, affording beautiful views of the farm.

We had an exceptionally delicious lunch starting with an anti-stress herbal cocktail. Following that we had squash soup, sweet potatoes, taro, squash, lettuce, cabbage, cucumbers, pickled beans, pickled cucumbers, pork, beef, fish, rice and beans. The most vegetables I ate all week! (Food for tourists tend to be meat focused, although the places we visited could cater for vegetarians and vegans.) We enjoyed flan for dessert.

After lunch we were given a guided tour of Finca Agroecológica El Paraiso. The boxed beds were very tidy, and they are all hand watered with water pumped from the river.

Creole spinach – see photo above. I do not know the Latin name for this vegetable, and in my research of hot weather cooking greens, particularly alternatives to spinach, I had not come across this crop before. Leave a comment if you know what it is.

Their “summer lettuce” is Tokyo bekana or maruba santoh. This use of the fast-growing chartreuse tender-leaved Asian green for a salad leaf was one I saw several times in Cuba. I thought I’d invented it! Haha! One summer when our lettuce did not grow according to plan, we served some Tokyo bekana as lettuce, and many people did not notice a difference! (Enough salad dressing will mask any vegetable flavor!) Some farms and restaurants simply call it “lettuce” or “summer lettuce”, some say it is a kind of pak choy, and a few can provide the actual name.

The farm grows aromatic herbs to deter bugs. They use tobacco stem solution to kill pests. Nicotine is a strong generalist poison, which used to be part of the toolkit of organic growers here in the US and in the UK. It has the advantage of being short-lived, so produce can be eaten the day after spraying.

See this video from Franny’s Farmacy. Made by two of my fellow travelers on the OGS Tour.

Finca Agroecológica El Paraiso, Viñales, Cuba – Learning about Sustainability and Organic Farming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egnKXHyu8_k

To see more, visit https://vimeo.com/146862523