Yumaika Pérez Guerrero is a forty-six year old woman with a degree in History and Marxism. A Cuban woman who, without fear of obstacles, decided to work the land and bet on rice cultivation at some point in her life.
She is currently one of the three producers of the grain in the municipality of Contramaestre in Santiago de Cuba. In her farm La faja whose property has an extension of one point seventy five hectares and with swampy characteristics this empowered woman decided to cultivate rice having as main resources, will and desire to do.
This peasant farmer obtained fourteen sacks of paddy rice in her first harvest as a test. Results that motivated her to continue with the production and that the agrarian extension system in this part of eastern Cuba focused the attention and support to this woman who from her little piece of land supports the production of food.
To meet Yumaika is to see a natural woman, clear and confident in her projects. She argues that -she was encouraged by Larisa Brizuela because she heard that there is a woman who grows rice and I said well, I am a woman too, so I am going to grow rice-. The farm is located in a low area with a lot of water, practically natural, and one day I told my husband -let’s plant rice because everything is going to waste- and he told me -well, let’s go-. I have some friends in Matanzas and they brought me the seed.
I started to remove star grass, pour water and plough. Everything has been done manually with the oxen, we have been working and we made the seedbed and I managed to plant a plot of rice.
The results have pleased me, I am happy, it is hard work but it is possible. I want to increase more areas of rice and continue cultivating this grain because we are going through these difficult times and we have to think about food sovereignty. We women can do it.
Yumaika currently tends the demonstration plot of the rice variety called Selection 2. The area is forty meters long and ten meters wide.
I consider myself a woman of impossible, strong and I like challenges and that rice for me is a challenge and as the General Secretary of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) said, we are women of steel and honey. We have worked practically all my crops have rotted with these three months of water but I am here and I keep going, I do not let myself fall. I get sad, but I get up and say that I can do it.
Perez Guerrero affirms that she has a Marti’s precept and that is that if man serves the land serves (…) those lands of mine told me – you are in a swamp that you make there but that swamp I have already seen the result, which is my rice harvested by my own hands.
Yumaika has a breadwinner without whom she would not have been able to get ahead, and that is her husband Yunior Volpara. For her, her life partner has been her support and she his – says this Contramaestrian farmer – because it is just the two of them together with some friends who support them on their farm on weekends. It is side by side, the two of them together.
This Mariana does not stop and in December she plans to plant the other part of rice that is missing. She has a big dream and that is to own a house of tapado. Maybe in the future I will be able to obtain it to plant short-cycle crops because now we are being called to this type of planting due to all the natural phenomena that have happened,” argues Pérez Guerrero. My dream is to produce and to be here. She tells us with her eyes twinkling when she talks about her farm, about her work to achieve all that this producer has, who is not afraid of the challenges that life puts in her way.
