Cuba's ecological future faces uncertainty

Friday, March 21, 2008
Cuba's ecological future faces uncertainty
Once Castro era, U.S. embargo end, experts worry about exploitation of
country's resources.
Cornelia Dean / New York Times

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 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 Cancun, 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 by 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.

About 700 miles long and about 100 miles wide at its widest, Cuba runs
from Haiti west almost to the Yucatan 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, is 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.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080321/NATION/803210311/1020/NATION