On 20-03-2024 10:14, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> org-persist forces encoding in Org 9.7-pre (development version).
> May you try it and let us know if your problem is still present there?
>
I have been looking into this, but it is not clear to me how to override 
emacs' builtin org-mode, and run another version.

I obtained the version from the repository as explained here: 
https://orgmode.org/org.html#Installation

Brian