Cuba's New Environmentalism Faces Challenges

BY ELIZA BARCLAY, Excerpts from The Environmental Magazine

Friday 11 June 2004

PUPILS at the elementary school in Los Tumbos, a village nestled deep within the rich agricultural province of Pinar Del Río, constantly hover around the computer awarded to the school a year ago. Their computer runs off of two small solar panels that gleam in the sun when not subjected to occasional rain showers in early summer.

One hundred feet away, across coffee bean drying troughs, is another solar-powered edifice: Los Tumbos' community television room where villagers congregate to choose among one of three state-run Cuban television stations.

Every night, villagers trudge down the steep hillsides, leaving behind coffee plants tended with minimal chemical inputs, to their homes. At seven, they might gather with their neighbors, many of whom belong to the same coffee cooperative, to watch Mesa Redonda, a public affairs show.

Los Tumbos is one of thousands of rural Cuban villages with schools, doctors' offices, salas de television, and hospitals drawing power from silicone-based solar panels. The government's initiative to electrify Cuba with solar, wind, microhydro, and biomass energy is one of the many programs that has caught the attention of sustainability gurus around the world, casting the country into the limelight as a model for environmental innovation.

In poorer communities like Los Tumbos, where basic human needs are just barely being met but where electricity arrived for the first time via affordable solar panels, a better future still hinges on a more vibrant economy. Many other Cuban and American experts agree that green-minded development is in part a consequence of the periodo especial or Special Period, the phase immediately following the Soviet Union's fall and the removal of its support of Cuba: 1990 to the late 1990s.

Carlos Garcia, an oceanographer with the Cuban Ministry of Industrial Fisheries, said that environmental protection was elevated significantly during the Special Period because producers could no longer ignore the possibility of a future with very limited resources.

OTHER GREEN SIGNS

Beyond the solar panels dotting rooftops, there are other green signs. In the long-neglected neighborhood of Central Havana, urban organic gardens, sandwiched between decrepit apartment buildings, are sprouting fresh vegetables and spices to stock and add flavor to schools, retirement homes, hospitals, and factory kitchens. In 2002, Cubans produced 3.4 million tons of food from 86,000 acres of urban land; in Havana, 90 percent of the city's fresh produce came from local urban farms and gardens.

In the U.S.-controlled Dry Tortugas, where brilliant, textured coral reefs teem with tropical fish and other striking sea life, Cuban scientists and resource managers have worked with Ken Lindeman, a senior scientist at Environmental Defense, to create two reserves that connect to a network of more than 20 marine parks.

Still, Bruno Henríquez, of the Renewable Energy Group at CubaEnergia and founding editor of Energia y Tu magazine, said, "I don't believe that in the future we [Cuba] will abandon renewable techniques due to the limited tenure of petroleum. We are looking toward sustainable development and a more efficient way to use energy."

The trickle of exports allowed into Cuba from the United States through the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act (TSRA) has the potential to turn into a heavy flow, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. And, as William Kennedy wrote in the introduction to the book Cuba on the Verge, "Billions of American investment dollars are hovering, waiting to rain on Cuba."

Approximately 1.7 million tourists visited Cuba in 2002. Cuban ecologists and policy makers may have to reconcile tourism increases and the subsequent encroachment of hotels and resorts with significant impacts to sensitive and valuable coastal ecosystems. "It is too early to predict what the long-term impacts of the substantial increase in tourism will be," said Lindeman.

Some leading Cuban environmental experts sense no threat from increasing international commerce. Rosa Elena Simeón Negrín, Minister of Science, Technology, and the Environment, said that the Ministry has set up a sophisticated system of environmental research and management institutes.

"Considering these established structures, the environment is not a transitory issue that can be brought down by more favorable economic conditions," she said. "It's a collective commitment that will remain under any circumstance, even when the U.S. blockade against Cuba is eliminated."

On the ground, literally in the trenches between raised beds, Filberto Samora, who manages a lush, award-winning organoponico (intensive, organic vegetable garden) in Havana, is confident that his garden is here to stay.

"It is very much a part of the neighborhood," he said. "We have learned to farm it successfully without pesticides, with our own seeds and compost and the help of neighbors."

The coffee farmers in Los Tumbos are also receiving significant training from groups such as the Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), which uses farmer-to-farmer training to promote sustainability.