La Picadora: People and nature in a rural Cuban community

Yusi Wang was a student in the spring 2017 Institute for Study Abroad program that took U.S. students to study for a semester at the University of Havana. Under the guidance of School of Biology professors Vanessa Vázquez Sánchez and Armando Rangel Rivero, Yusi and her classmates spent four transformational days as part of the community in La Picadora. It’s clear from her poem that living in this community grabbed her heart in a special way. Reading this book, you’ll see how the authors of each chapter are captivated by the La Picadora community. Let yourself be drawn into these stories, that together serve as a microscope into the lives of the people of this community, past and present. Reading this book gives us a unique opportunity to understand a bit about these lives that are at once so distant from some of the authors’ lives, yet so clearly a part of our interconnected world, economy, environment, and knowledge base.