Ecotourism in Cuba
by Brian Simpson
Along a footpath at the base of a small mountain called Loma el Salon, Fidel Hernandez Figueroa stops and jumps. Not quite high enough. He jumps again. This time he nabs a pomarrosa, a pale yellow fruit that looks like a tiny spherical squash, and bites into it. The forestry engineer is taking a break from his strolling tutorial about the plants in one of Cuba’s best-known ecotourism sites: Sierra del Rosario Biosphere Reserve, a 50,000-acre swatch in the island’s western province of Pinar del Rio.
Moments later, he pats the gray trunk of an immense royal palm. "The campesinos use every part of the tree," he says, and then catalogs the uses. The palm fronds make excellent thatched roofs; the thick green spathe at the trunk’s top is used to cure tobacco leaves; the flowers produce a high-quality nectar that draws bees that produce honey; the tiny black fruit is used to fatten pigs; the trunk is used to build houses; and the roots are eaten to treat kidney infections.
The husky engineer walks on as a light rain falls, tapping on the leaves of ferns, trees, bushes, vines, and flowers. The late May wind carries the scents of muddy soil and green plants. Hernandez stoops to point out a star-shaped flower with white petals. "They explode horses," he says. Then he notices the visitors’ perplexed reaction. He explains that local campesinos call the flowers benenosas ("venomous ones") because they are so poisonous. Later, he points out the withered leaves fallen from a yagruma tree. With one side white, the other brown, the leaves look like old gloves drying on the ground. Campesinos boil these down to treat asthma.
Hernandez’s encyclopedic knowledge of local flora and fauna makes him an ideal guide for those who want to experience Cuba’s majestic wild areas. Increasingly, tourists interested in the environment are discovering Cuba, which possesses a unique diversity of endemic species. Some on the island and abroad hope that these ecotourists will help sustain the country’s isolated rural communities and preserve its rich biodiversity. Yet, as one Cuban government official advises, "Whenever you mention tourism, you should be cautious."
Cuba’s Tourism Boom
A teenage couple in black Spandex outfits leap through a break-dancing and gymnastics routine set to deafening disco tunes. Some of the more than 1,000 international travel industry representatives attending a mid-May tourism convention in Havana’s Pabexpo convention center stop to gawk. The teens dance, tumble, and gyrate through a flat-out, hard-sell of Cuba’s sensuality and vividness. The ninth annual Cuban Tourism Convention offers more than 120 exhibits selling everything Cuba has to offer from airline flights and luxury resorts to package trips, dive trips, and fishing and boat tours. The Cuban government intends to support the country’s recent tourism boom with plenty of diversions. After decades of negligible tourism, it expects the 1.2 million visitors in 1997 to increase to more than two million by the year 2000. To accommodate this influx, the country is expanding its hotel capacity from 27,400 rooms in 1997 to more than 40,000 by 2000, according to tourism ministry statistics. Should the 38-year-old U.S. economic embargo against Cuba be lifted and U.S. citizens be allowed to travel directly to the island nation, the number of tourists could soar beyond these targets.
Following the early 1990s’ loss of subsidies from the Soviet Union, the country slipped into economic free-fall. Cuba’s gross domestic product fell by one-third from 1989 to 1993, according to U.S. government estimates. After seeing its Caribbean neighbors bring in shiploads of hard currency through tourism, the Cuban government made tourism development a national priority. Legions of tourists from Europe and Canada now visit the island for inexpensive tropical holidays. But now, some experts fear that Cuba’s pristine beaches, forests, and rare species are threatened.
Unique Biodiversity
"There is no question at all that, in relation to the number of species and endemic species, Cuba is the single most important island in the New World," says Michael Smith, Director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program and the U.S.-Cuban Scientific Exchange at the Center for Marine Conservation. Smith supports his assertion with the biogeographical truism that "the number of species increase as island size increases." Cuba, which comprises more than one-third of the land area in the Caribbean, boasts nearly four times as many plant species as Jamaica and almost 12 times as many as Puerto Rico, according to Smith, a frequent traveler to Cuba and the Caribbean since the late 1980s. Recent biological surveys by Cuban researchers show that 40 percent of species of macrofauna (animals, including insects, reptiles, and amphibians, visible to the naked eye) that they encountered are new to science, he notes. Even this stunning diversity of species must represent only a portion of what existed before colonization. Five hundred years after the arrival of Europeans, forests that almost covered the island now cling to less than 20 percent of the land.
From his office on a tree-shaded Havana street where birds sing and nest in the concrete skeleton of an unfinished building nearby, Antonio Perera Puga, director of the National Center for Protected Areas, knows quite well what’s at stake in the future. As an example, he points to his favorite of Cuba’s environmental treasures. "The Zapata Swamp is probably the most important wetlands in the Caribbean," Perera says of the one million-acre wetlands, the largest in the West Indies, located less than 100 miles southeast of Havana. The swamp and its near-twin, Florida’s Everglades, share many of the same plant species like sawgrass and mangroves. In addition, the Zapata Swamp acts as a critical refuge for North American breeding birds migrating along the route through Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to South America. Las Salinas, a wildlife sanctuary on the Zapata peninsula, hosts more than 100 species of migratory birds. "In the migratory season, the birds are really incredible. There are just clouds of birds," Perera says. Of the 22 species of birds endemic to Cuba, three can be found only in the Zapata Swamp: the almost- impossible-to-see Zapata rail and the more common Zapata sparrow and Zapata wren. The most important population of the bee hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world, lives in the area. Endangered manatees cruise the marshes along the shore. The Cuban crocodile, found nowhere else in the world, lurks among the swamp’s waterways.
Perera lists other rich environmental sites: Turquino National Park, boasting Cuba’s highest peak, Pico Turquino, at 6,474 feet; Desembaco del Granma National Park with its rugged landscapes and endemic lizards, frogs, and snails; Caguanes National Park, a group of islands off the north-central coast; and, the tropical rainforests of Alexander von Humboldt National Park. Each provides examples of Cuba’s diversity, beauty, and fragility.
For all its natural riches, Cuba is a poor country desperately seeking economic development. Ecotourism, generally defined as nature tourism that conserves the environment and provides sustainable economic activity for local peoples, seems to offer a promising, if imperfect, solution.
Clean, Sustainable Tourism
Smith frames the issue of conservation and ecotourism this way: "It’s not possible for an island country with finite resources and growing population to put something into reserve and forget about it. Caribbean island countries know that their demands will grow every year, but the islands don’t grow. They say if you want to reserve something, you’ve got to make it pay its way. Ecotourism is one way to reserve something and make it pay."
Ecotourism generates revenue in a clean, sustainable way that cannot be matched by mainstream "beach and cruise" tourism, according to Megan Epler Wood, president of the Ecotourism Society based in North Bennington, Vermont. "Ecotourism is a form of low-impact, low-technology, and low-capital tourism development. For all these reasons, Cubans can use it and benefit from it," she says. Wood decries the choices the Cuban government has made in focusing on big hotels, which often bring crime and prostitution problems like those that plagued Cuba before the 1959 revolution. "All those social impacts involved are terrible," she says.
The small community of Las Terrazas, located in the middle of the Sierra del Rosario Biosphere Reserve, seems beyond the reach of such problems. While some point to the community as a textbook case of ecotourism’s benefits, others are less than convinced.
Las Terrazas Experiment
At first glimpse, the 900 inhabitants of this village live in paradise. White-walled and clay-tiled houses sprout from the lush green hills. School children, wearing red skirts or shorts, talk and giggle as they cross a bridge over the community’s small reservoir. City scourges, such as garbage, crumbling buildings, and roaring traffic, are unknown here. The tranquillity and graceful mix of nature and people belie the area’s history. Only 30 years ago, ten to 15 families scratched out a subsistence living on the steep, treeless hillsides here. Trees in the lower elevations had been cut down by the campesinos to make charcoal for cooking fuel. Then the government decided to regenerate the impoverished community. Osmany Cienfuegos, current Minister of Tourism, was the project chief and supervised the creation of the terraces against the hills that allowed for reforestation and gave the community its name. Bulldozers carved 14-foot-wide terraces into the ravaged hillsides so that trees could be planted and grow. Workers from all over Cuba came to help the community with reforestation and the building of homes and apartments.
"We’re trying to integrate man, the environment, and history here," says Eric Gonzalez Guerrero, a coordinator and tourism guide at Las Terrazas. "Las Terrazas is the result of 30 years of work." Gonzalez sits in a small, air-conditioned office in a tidy, one-story building that houses the Las Terrazas management. A fervent, poetry-writing socialist, Gonzalez came here from Havana eight years ago as a topographer and fell in love with the place. "I came here for more opportunity, to have a home, and be part of the whole community. It’s enough. What more do you want in life?"
Named by the United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as Cuba’s first biosphere reserve in 1985, the area contains 889 species of plants, 11 of Cuba’s 22 endemic birds, and one of the smallest frogs in the world, the thimble-sized ranita. The small mountains and valleys of the area seem to be covered by an emerald-green drape of the leaves of its most common trees, the macurije ("bastard mahogany"), majagua ("blue mahoe"), and macagua ("milkwood"). Cuba’s omnipresent royal palm frequently shoots up through the canopy like green bursts of fireworks frozen in mid-explosion. Beauty alone, however, proved not to be enough for the community. By 1990, Soviet subsidies were cut and Cuba plunged into an economic abyss euphemistically dubbed the "Special Period." The people of Las Terrazas didn’t have enough food and were limited to what they were permitted to take from the reserve. "So the government decided to build the Hotel Moka to develop tourism," Gonzalez recounts. The 26-room hotel opened four years later, providing jobs for the growing community and a comfortable base for the mostly European and Canadian visitors. Ecotourists can venture into the lush forests for day hikes or five-day-long treks—always under the scrutiny of a guide who is careful to limit the impact. "Everything you can do in this zone must be guided in order to protect the environment," Gonzalez says. In high season, October to February, more than 1,900 people visit the area per month, making it necessary to restrict the number of visitors to certain areas of the park.
One visitor, Ellen Larsen, of Princeton, New Jersey, says she is using her time in the park to learn more about the environment. "I think it’s the best way to learn about biodiversity. There’s no better way to see it than in the wild," Larsen says. "You don’t just see things in isolation. You see how things fit together." Another visitor on the same educational tour, Ed Blaisdell of Portola Valley, California, says he’s in Las Terrazas for the same reasons. "I’m more interested in this type of thing [than going to a beach resort]," he says.
Such visitors help the local people enjoy a higher living standard than many in Cuba. However, the employees earn far less than they might in other countries and would have to work for weeks to pay for one night at the hotel. Still, Gonzalez insists that the arrival of ecotourists has had a profound, positive impact in Las Terrazas. "It’s an enormous benefit to recycle through the community. Almost everything we have is a result of money from tourism," Gonzalez says. "We had a place where people were living in misery. Now, we have something. We have a community."
Problems with Ecotourism
Although he’s eating a tantalizing lunch of chicken, black beans and rice, and fried plantains in one of Havana’s best restaurants, Miguel Vales Garcia, is uneasy. The Director of Cuba’s National Center for Biodiversity isn’t happy with the slippery definitions of ecotourism. "There is a general idea that ecotourism is putting a hotel inside a beautiful natural area. This is not ecotourism," he says. "Ecotourism is increasing the knowledge of people without destroying nature. If you make a nice hotel in the center of an ecosystem, you are affecting the system. Many of the species living there will slowly go away. When species abandon an ecosystem, then the ecosystem is destroyed unless man intervenes."
As a scientist, Vales has the natural desire to apply rational order to disorder. While disorder is standard for the tourism industry, chaos might better describe the dozens of companies in Cuba that are scrambling to label their tours "ecotourism." EcoTur S.A., the state-owned agency devoted to ecotourism, proudly displays an antelope skin, a shotgun, camouflage hunting gear, and fishing rods at its booth in the tourism convention. At Rancho Azucarero, about 40 miles west of Havana, "ecotourists" ride horses onto a quasi-savanna and take safari-style photos of antelopes, wildebeest, zebras, and other African animals imported in the 1970s. Other firms touting ecotourism emphasize jeep rides, swimming pools, air-conditioning, romance, and tropical drinks more than flora and fauna. The marketing of such questionable activities as ecotourism has been called "greenwashing" by those in the industry. Jamie Sweeting, Ecotourism Program Manager with Conservation International, believes businesses can get away with these techniques for only so long. "I think we’re in the adolescence of the term—ten years ago people didn’t even know what ecotourism was. Now, we’ve been through all the faux-marketing, the greenwashing, and consumers are demanding more responsibility."
Perera, the chief of the country’s protected areas, says that problems with ecotourism go beyond how it is advertised to how it is actually performed by "ecotourism" companies. "They are not always orthodox in doing ecotourism. Of course, they want to have more money and they are not always looking out for the interests of nature. They want to sign up more and more people," Perera says. "And in ecotourism, you have to know which areas to protect, what their carrying capacities are. If you come to Zapata Swamp to look at the birds in a specific area and you bring more than eight or ten people, you can have an impact. Some areas are very fragile."
To protect against such abuses, Vales has assigned Daysi Vilamajo, head of the national biodiversity center’s Landscape Ecology Department, to develop rules for tourism and the environment in Cuba. Vilamajo says that her team has reviewed rules already used by Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico to determine what can be applied to Cuba. The challenge is to balance scientific concerns with the real-world need for tourist dollars. "As scientists, we’re more concerned with protecting the environment so sometimes we seem too rigid, too much like ‘You can’t come in this zone!’" Keeping that balance in mind, Vilamajo hopes that the project will direct Cuba’s future with tourism. "What we’re going to do when the project is done is go to the director of tourism and show him we can protect the environment and create an industry that’s successful," she says.
Few doubt that Cuba’s tourism industry will always derive its greatest revenues from beach resorts and cities. However, Perera argues that ecotourism can still play a positive role in environmentally sensitive locations. "I think ecotourism when it's planned in a proper way could be a good help for protected areas. We need to develop the infrastructure for ecotourism. We need to be developing information centers, interpreters, guides, et cetera." he says. "If we can plan in the proper way, ecotourism will be an income source." Perera pauses. "It’s not magic. It’s not the solution. But it is a way we can make work for us."
--Brian Simpson is a freelance writer based in Baltimore, Maryland. This is his first story for ZooGoer.
Editor’s Note: Although thousands of Americans are flocking to Cuba and the Caribbean island has become a darling of the travel media, travel to and commerce in Cuba is restricted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. For more information, contact the Office of Foreign Assets Control at (202) 622-2480.
ZooGoer 28(1) 1999. Copyright 1999 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
