Hábitat Cuba
Founded in 1974, Habitat-Cuba works on issues of self-help housing, urbanity, the environment, and other problem associated with the habitat. Currently 800,000 to 1,000,000 Cubans lack adequate housing, living either with family or in substandard construction. Habitat looks for alternative, sustainable, participatory solutions with equitable criteria though demonstrative practices of research development, training, documentation, communication, and technical advisory services. Habitat works with communities to create new housing while eradicating preexisting hazardous conditions and neighborhoods. While Cuba has sufficient labor resources, the embargo has resulted in a lack of building materials and other resources. Habitat-Cuba has relations with 50 international NGOs and not-for-profit organizations, which have provided financial and material aid. Habitat looks to these outside resources for assistance, but focuses its efforts on the production and use of local materials and adequate technologies. One recent initiative explored bamboo as an alternative to wood – a material in scarce supply, but needed in housing construction for windows and doors – developing the appropriate technology and planting bamboo groves for harvesting.
Contact Information: Selma Díaz, President, Hábitat-Cuba, Ave. 7 #701, esq. a 41 Miramar, Playa; telephone: 53.7.22.7349, 24.0105; fax: 53.7.24.0105; selma@habitat.get.cma.net.
Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños
The National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) was founded in 1961 as a mass organization to represent the interests of small agriculturists. ANAP works in cooperation with numerous government ministries, including sugar, education, foreign trade, and culture, but has not received any government funding for over ten years. The organization has 232,000 members, of which 162,000 are private property owners who use its collective services and credit programs. The rest are small producers who work on agropastoral cooperatives. In addition to lobbying assembly and other government offices to obtain polices that benefit their constituencies, ANAP provides numerous resources to its farmers, from social security and retirement funds to various forms of technological assistance and equipment. Since its initiation, ANAP has worked in cooperation with international NGOs, mainly from Canada and Europe. In 1995, they began the Cuban Organic Agriculture Exchange Program with the US organization, the Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Contact Information: Mavis Alverez, Director of International Cooperation, Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños, Calle 13, esq. 1 No. 206 Vedado; telephone/fax 32 8586; telephone: 53.7.33.4244; fax: 53.7.24.0591; proyecto@anap.org.cu.
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