Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006)

Source: http://planetinfocus.org/festival/power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil

With the onset of peak oil looming over the world as a spectre, a crucial conversation has begun, to seek solutions for coping with depleting levels of oil. We can learn lessons from the only country to have survived such a peak oil crisis: Cuba.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 drew Cuba into an economic catastrophe. Overnight, the country lost more than half of its oil imports and 80 percent of its food capacity. Against all odds, the country coped remarkably well by creating a sustainable local economy focusing largely on organic agricultural methods while preserving Cuba’s socialist ideals.

Faith Morgan is a board member of Community Service, Inc., (CSI) a non-profit organization founded in 1940 to research and promote small communities. Faith traveled to Cuba three times to study the after effects of the fall of the USSR, when over half of Cuba’s oil subsidies were suddenly cut off. She felt it important for the organization to tell the story of this major social disaster and Cuba’s creative response to living without cheap and abundant oil. Morgan, a painter, potter, sculptor, and writer turned to film for the first time to tell this story.


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