As Cuba's economy withers, its ecology thrives
By Cornelia Dean
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Through accidents of geography and history, Cuba is a priceless
ecological resource. That is why many scientists are so worried about
what will become of it after Fidel Castro and his associates leave power
and, as is widely anticipated, the American government relaxes or ends
its trade embargo.
Cuba, by far the region's largest island, sits at the confluence of the
Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Its mountains,
forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals,
some seen nowhere else.
And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the
collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its major economic patron, Cuba's
economy has stagnated.
Cuba has not been free of development, including Soviet-style top-down
agricultural and mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of
tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in
the region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise
destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution, when development
has been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a
flood of investors from the United States and elsewhere, eager to
exploit those landscapes.
Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and
elsewhere, met last month in Cancún, Mexico, to discuss the island's
resources and how to continue to protect them.
Cuba has done "what we should have done — identify your hot spots of
biodiversity and set them aside," said Oliver Houck, a professor of
environmental law at Tulane University Law School who attended the
conference.
In the late 1990s, Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by
the MacArthur Foundation, to advise Cuban officials writing new
environmental laws.
But, he said in an interview, "an invasion of U.S. consumerism, a
U.S.-dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer" when the
embargo ends.
By some estimates, tourism in Cuba is increasing 10 percent annually. At
a minimum, Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing
effort, said in an interview at the conference, "we can guess that
tourism is going to increase in a very fast way" when the embargo ends.
"It is estimated we could double tourism in one year," said Rey, who
heads environmental efforts at the Cuban ministry of science, technology
and environment.
About 700 miles long and about 100 miles wide at its widest, Cuba runs
from Haiti west almost to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It offers
crucial habitat for birds, like Bicknell's thrush, whose summer home is
in the mountains of New England and Canada, and the North American
warblers that stop in Cuba on their way south for the winter.
Zapata Swamp, on the island's southern coast, may be notorious for its
mosquitoes, but it is also known for its fish, amphibians, birds and
other creatures. Among them is the Cuban crocodile, which has retreated
to Cuba from a range that once ran from the Cayman Islands to the Bahamas.
Cuba has the most biologically diverse populations of freshwater fish in
the region. Its relatively large underwater coastal shelves are crucial
for numerous marine species, including some whose larvae can be carried
by currents into waters of the United States, said Ken Lindeman, a
marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology.
Lindeman, who did not attend the conference but who has spent many years
studying Cuba's marine ecology, said in an interview that some of these
creatures were important commercial and recreational species like the
spiny lobster, grouper or snapper.
Like corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming
raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. And like other corals in
the region, they reeled when a mysterious die-off of sea urchins left
them with algae overgrowth. But they have largely escaped damage from
pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing practices.
Diving in them "is like going back in time 50 years," said David
Guggenheim, a conference organizer and an ecologist and member of the
advisory board of the Harte Research Institute, which helped organize
the meeting along with the Center for International Policy, a private
group in Washington.
In a report last year, the World Wildlife Fund said that "in dramatic
contrast" to its island neighbors, Cuba's beaches, mangroves, reefs,
seagrass beds and other habitats were relatively well preserved. Their
biggest threat, the report said, was "the prospect of sudden and massive
growth in mass tourism when the U.S. embargo lifts."
To prepare for that day, researchers from a number of American
institutions and organizations are working on ecological conservation in
Cuba, including Harte, the Wildlife Conservation Society, universities
like Tulane and Georgetown, institutions like the American Museum of
Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden, and others. What they
are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance, turtle
migration and land use patterns.
Cuban scientists at the conference noted that this work continued a
tradition of collaboration that dates from the mid-19th century, when
Cuban researchers began working with naturalists from the Smithsonian
Institution. In the 20th century, naturalists from Harvard and the
University of Havana worked together for decades.
But now, they said, collaborative relationships are full of problems.
The Cancún meeting itself illustrated one.
"We would have liked to be able to do this in Havana or in the United
States," Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero, the director of the Cuban science
and environment agency and leader of the Cuban delegation, said through
a translator in opening the meeting. "This we cannot do." While the
American government grants licenses to some (but not all) American
scientists seeking to travel to Cuba, it routinely rejects Cuban
researchers seeking permission to come to the United States, researchers
from both countries said.
So meeting organizers turned to Alberto Mariano Vázquez De la Cerda, a
retired admiral in the Mexican navy, an oceanographer with a doctorate
from Texas A & M and a member of the Harte advisory board, who
supervised arrangements for the Cuban conferees.
The travel situation is potentially even worse for researchers at state
institutions in Florida. Jennifer Gebelein, a geographer at Florida
International University who uses global positioning systems to track
land use in Cuba, told the meeting about restrictions imposed by the
Florida Legislature, which has barred state colleges from using public
or private funds for travel to Cuba.
As a result of this move and federal restrictions, Gebelein said "we're
not sure what is going to happen" with her research program.
On the other hand, John Thorbjarnarson, a zoologist with the Wildlife
Conservation Society, said that he had difficulty obtaining permission
from Cuba to visit some areas in that country, like a habitat area for
the Cuban crocodile near the Bay of Pigs.
"I have to walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do
and what the Cubans allow me to do," said Thorbjarnarson, who did not
attend the conference. "It is not easy to walk that line."
But he had nothing but praise for his scientific colleagues in Cuba.
Like other American researchers, he described them as doing highly
competent work with meager resources. "They are a remarkable bunch of
people," Thorbjarnarson said, "but my counterparts make on average
probably less than $20 a month."
American scientists, foundations and other groups are ready to help with
equipment and supplies but are hampered by the embargo. For example,
Maria Elena Ibarra Martín, a marine scientist at the University of
Havana, said through a translator that American organizations had
provided Cuban turtle and shark researchers with tags and other
equipment. They shipped it via Canada.
Another thorny issue is ships.
"If you are going to do marine science, at some point you have to go out
on a ship," said Robert Hueter, who directs the center for shark
research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, and
attended the Cancún meeting.
But, he and others said, the United States government will not allow
ships into American ports if they have recently been in Cuban waters in
the previous six months, and the Cuban government will not allow
American research vessels in Cuban waters.
One answer might be vessels already in Cuba, but nowadays they are often
tied up in tourism-related efforts, Cubans at the Cancún meeting said.
And even with a ship, several American researchers at the conference
said, it is difficult to get Cuban government permission to travel to
places like the island's northwest coast, the stretch closest to the
United States. As a result, that region is the least-studied part of the
Cuban coast, Guggenheim and others said.
Another big problem in Cuba is the lack of access to a source of
information researchers almost everywhere else take for granted: the
Internet.
Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access to the
Internet as a form of censorship. The Cuban government blames the
embargo, which it says has left the country with inadequate bandwidth
and other technical problems that require it to limit Internet access to
people who need it most.
In any event, "we find we do not have access," Teresita Borges
Hernández, a biologist in the environment section of Cuba's science and
technology ministry, said through a translator. She appealed to the
Americans at the meeting to do "anything, anything to improve this
situation."
Guggenheim echoed the concern and said even telephone calls to Cuba
often cost as much as $2 a minute. "These details, though they may seem
trite," he said, "are central to our ability to collaborate."
Gebelein and several of the Cubans at the meeting said that some
American Web sites barred access to people whose electronic addresses
identify them as Cuban. She suggested that the group organize a Web site
in a third country, a site where they could all post data, papers and
the like, and everyone would have access to it.
For Guggenheim, the best lessons for Cubans to ponder as they
contemplate a more prosperous future can be seen 90 miles north, in the
Florida Keys. There, he said, too many people have poured into an
ecosystem too fragile to support them.
"As Cuba becomes an increasingly popular tourist resort," Guggenheim
said, "we don't want to see and they don't want to see the same
mistakes, where you literally love something to death."
But there are people skeptical that Cuba will resist this kind of
pressure. One of them is Houck.
The environmental laws he worked on are "a very strong structure," he
said, "But all laws do is give you the opportunity to slow down the
wrong thing. Over time, you can wear the law down."
That is particularly true in Cuba, he said, "where there's no armed
citizenry out there with high-powered science groups pushing in the
opposite direction. What they lack is the counter pressure of
environmental groups and environmental activists."
As Rey and Daniel Whittle, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, put it in
the book "Cuban Studies 37" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006),
"policymaking in Cuba is still centralized and top down." But, they
wrote, "much can be done to enhance public input in policymaking."
Rey said in the interview that Cubans must be encouraged to use their
environmental laws. By "some kind of cultural habit," he said, people in
Cuba rarely turn to the courts to challenge decisions they dislike.
"There's no litigation, just a few cases here and there," Rey said. "In
most community situations if a citizen has a problem he writes a letter.
That's O.K., but it's not all the possibilities."
Rey added, "We have to promote more involvement, not only in access to
justice and claims, but in taking part in the decision process."
"I know the state has a good system from the legislative point of view,"
Rey said. But as he and Whittle noted in their paper, "the question now
is whether government leaders can and will do what it takes to put the
plan on the ground."
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