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 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. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors eager to exploit those landscapes.
Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and elsewhere, met last month in Mexico to discuss the island’s resources and how to continue to protect them.
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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 on new environmental laws.
‘Like a bulldozer’
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, said Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing effort, “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 across at its widest, Cuba offers crucial habitat for birds, like Bicknell’s thrush, whose summer home is in 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 U.S. waters, said Ken Lindeman, a marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology.
Like corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. But they have largely escaped damage from pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing.
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.
Biggest threat
In a report last year, the World Wildlife Fund said that “in dramatic contrast” to its island neighbors, Cuba’s beaches, mangroves, reefs 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 others. What they are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance, turtle migration and land use patterns.
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 Martin, 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 — shipped via Canada.
Another 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, director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., who attended the conference.
But, he and others said, the U.S. will not allow ships into American ports if they have been in Cuban waters in the previous six months, and Cuba will not allow American research vessels in Cuban waters.
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 that most take for granted: the Internet.
Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access as a form of censorship. The Cuban government said the embargo has left the country with inadequate bandwidth and other technical problems.
For Guggenheim, the best lessons for Cubans to ponder 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.
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“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.”