The Ragged Edge of the World (28 page)

While it would be absurd to justify the repression and lack of freedom imposed by the Cuban government, it must be recognized how well positioned that nation finds itself going forward. As the rest of the world begins to grapple with a fossil-fuel-constrained future, Cuba has the advantage of years of trying to come to grips with the problem through trial and error. Maybe the last shall be first, as the Bible avers.

It's not the way we'd like it to be, but good can come out of bad and suffering. Just as the Nicaraguan civil war limited logging and left the nation with the healthiest ecosystems in Central America once hostilities ended (an opportunity for sound policies that Nicaragua immediately set about squandering), so have the costs of Cuba's harsh dictatorship and isolation left the nation ideally positioned to improve the material well-being of its people without repeating the ecologically and culturally catastrophic errors of every other emerging nation. Given the depressing history of environmental degradation that has characterized development, it's fair to say that Cuba's future represents the world's best and perhaps last chance to find a balance between material improvement and the needs of nature.

Here is Cuba, a nation bottled up in a time capsule for fifty years and only now beginning to emerge from isolation. But Cubans have been able to witness what has been going on in the outside world, even as they have been condemned (some would say blessed) to remain in the past. Cubans have had fifty years to figure out what aspects of modernity are truly beneficial and which ones represent a poisoned chalice. If Cuba with its stable population and highly educated workforce can't turn this into something workable, there is faint hope for the rest of the world.

If this were the only reason Cuba caught my attention, the stakes would justify any amount of effort to try to bring this slowly unfolding test of Cuba's moral fiber to the world's attention. But there is much more to Cuba than its de facto status as an experiment in post-fossil-fuel sustainable living. It's a fascinating island in a biogeographic sense, and its ecological history offers a glimpse of what we might expect for the world in the future in the realm of ecology. Cuba exemplifies the fascinating transformations that islands work on various life forms, most notably the proliferation of giant and dwarf variants of various species in the wild. What has happened in Cuba is now happening everywhere in the world, for as humanity colonizes every habitable hectare of the globe, it is transforming formerly vast and interconnected ecosystems into an archipelago of biologically isolated islands.

I knew I had to get to Cuba, but it took several years for me to find a publication that was willing to send me there. Finally, in the fall of 2002, I got the chance when
Smithsonian
magazine agreed to give me an assignment. (As an aside, I'm sure that some readers wonder why I didn't just go there on my own. The reason was simple: Cuba is a police state, and I needed official credentials to get access to the park officials and biologists I wished to interview. I didn't want to show up to be detained in Havana.)

I set up the trip with the help of Mary Pearl, then executive director of Wildlife Trust, and Luis Gomez-Echeverri, who was then director of the UNDP mission in Cuba. Between them I ended up with a spectacular itinerary that took me through the parks, coastline and towns of Oriente and then down to Zapata Swamp. Mary Pearl's group has been working in Cuba for years, providing support and expertise for Cuban environmentalists. She had superb contacts among its biologists and ornithologists and gave me an insightful overview of Cuba's importance to the Caribbean and regional ecology. Luis agreed to cooperate in part because Cuba was one of the few nations that actually took the United Nations-sponsored Rio Earth Summit of 1991 seriously, and he thought the country exemplified the crucial concept that protecting nature does not first require that a nation be rich.

I flew to Cuba via Cancún on October 20, 2002, and was met at the airport by Alberto Perez, an information officer from the UNDP, an affable sixty-something who remained a fervent supporter of Fidel Castro. Alberto brought along his ten-year-old son, who sported a tattoo on his arm. We drove to Havana through a huge downpour. There were few cars on the road, but those we did encounter represented every vintage American car imaginable. “There's a Torpedo,” said Alberto, pointing out a futuristic car from the 1940s. “There's a '56 Bel Air like mine!” And so on for the entire drive. He was as passionate as a birdwatcher, annotating every observation with a comment. Some of the cars we encountered were immaculate, others barely moved. I asked how people found parts, and Alberto explained that they made them, scavenged, or used substitutes. “Our mechanics can fix anything,” he said with pride. Because of these alterations, few of these vehicles would be candidates for an American vintage car show. Many of the cars also now had diesel engines. I mentioned to Alberto how many Americans long for the Caribbean of forty years ago, and how this could be a selling point for Cuba as it opens. “Sixty years ago!” he replied with incongruous pride, given that he also presents himself as a fervent supporter of the changes of the Castro years.

Alberto dropped me off at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, a gracefully crumbling but still glorious colonial wreck, where I spent the night before meeting up with Luis the next morning. Luis had arranged for us to fly to Holguín in Oriente, and then drive through much of the region before flying back from Santiago de Cuba. Our group consisted of Luis; Antonio Perera, a former parks official who was instrumental in setting up many of Cuba's protected areas; and Alberto. Perhaps I should feel guilty for saying this, given the economic privation I witnessed, but this trip was one of the happiest I've ever taken, at least once I safely disembarked from the rickety Russian Yak plane that took us to Holguín.

As we drove away from the airport, the cavalcade of cars from days long gone continued. We passed Studebakers, Packards, Willys, DeSotos, Nashes and Diamond Trucks, some dating back to the '30s. I couldn't help remarking on each one, and neither could Alberto. When I finally asked him why he still showed such enthusiasm in identifying these living relics, he simply said, “These were the cars of my youth.” This remark was the closest Alberto came to showing any wistfulness for the old days, when his family owned sixteen homes.

Not long after leaving Holguín we entered the Cuban time warp. The empty roads were litter-free and lined by thatch-roofed houses, villagers sold fruit and sugarcane juice along the way, and neat hedges of euphorbia completed the image of the Caribbean of a half-century earlier. Everyone we encountered was relaxed and cheerful. I can't help but say it: Maybe the best word to describe the feel of this sleepy part of the island is, in fact, “timeless.” That may account, at least in part, for why I felt so happy—at least for a few days, I couldn't hear the beat of the metronome. I kept thinking of the notion of “sunk costs,” which was immediately followed by another thought:
This place has a chance.

After going through small villages immortalized by the late Campay Segundo of Buena Vista Social Club fame, we headed for Alejandro de Humboldt National Park on the northeast coast. At 300 square miles, it would be considered enormous in any country, but on an island Cuba's size it is truly remarkable. The park is essentially a roll-up, combining prior protected areas with some added lands. To some degree it's Antonio Perera's baby. I've spent a great deal of time around hard-core conservationists in every corner of the globe, and Tony has all the hallmarks of the species. He's intense, uncompromising, highly intelligent and straight talking, and he radiates conviction. He explained that the park grew directly out of the Convention of Biodiversity, which, anemic though it was, represented one of the few concrete achievements of the Earth Summit.

The park is big, beautiful and wild, but, best of all, much of it is inaccessible. We drove in, fording streams, and then Tony and I hiked a bit to a vista point where we could look into the interior. On our hike we encountered patches of mariposa, the national flower, which has a delicate, seductive fragrance. From our vista point, we could see a high plateau with waterfalls streaming down its steep face. Tony said that much of that plateau was unexplored. Among the wonders that may await biologists there is the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was thought to have gone extinct in the 1950s until a pair was sighted in Cuba in 1987. More recently, ornithologists made credible recordings of the bird in 2005 in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.

The discovery of the pair of birds in 1987 was one impetus for formalizing protection of the area that was to become Humboldt National Park. The bigger question, however, is why there was a push for protection at all, particularly since conservation was the last thing on the minds of most Communist leaders (at least until Mikhail Gorbachev took over in Russia). The answer had to do with an accident of fate.

As luck would have it, the illiterate farmer Guillermo Garcia Frías, who saved Castro's life when he came ashore from the yacht
Granma
on December 2, 1956, happened to be a nature lover. Batista's troops were waiting when Castro arrived, and his ragtag group scattered during the ensuing battle. Commandante Garcia (as he came to be known) found Fidel, his brother Raúl and some others and took them to the Sierra Maestra, which ranges along the southern coast. The forces regrouped, and Garcia ultimately led Castro's Western Army and became a member of the Central Committee and Politburo.

Throughout the campaign and afterward Garcia retained, as Tony put it, a “naïve” love of nature and particularly of the Sierra Maestra. In the 1980s he created a technical group to, as Tony described it, “put a little science and technology” into the design of protected areas. Tony was part of this group and worked closely with Garcia. More important, Garcia's political clout provided cover for the nurturing and development of an entire generation of conservation biologists and parks planners who now held senior positions in the government. Later, Luis told me that there were two people in the Cuban government who could get anything done they wanted. One was the man in charge of the restoration of Havana, and the other was Garcia.

After our brief hike, we returned to the main road and made our way to Taco Bay, a rare place on earth where pines and mangroves grow side by side. We stopped at the park station to meet up with a ranger, Durán Oliveros, and take a tour of the bay. Near the headquarters of the park is a statue of Humboldt, the German explorer who lived to be ninety (dying in 1859), and who was the first to map Cuba accurately. The bay is fed by three rivers and has one small outlet to the sea. We putt-putted around in a small boat powered by an impossibly small outboard (yet another reminder that fuel was scarce and expensive) and looked for manatees. We didn't see any but explored a few inlets into the mangroves that can only be described as tunnels, since the mangroves formed a closed canopy over us. We went ashore on the far side of the bay and hiked up to the ruins of the villa owned by two Americans, known only as “Mr. Mike” and “Mr. Phil.” The roofs were gone and strangler vines were cracking the walls as the jungle reclaimed the formerly elegant estate.

That image provided a metaphorical reminder that nature had come back, at least to some degree, in Cuba. When Christopher Columbus landed in 1492, the island was about 90 percent forested, according to Tony. By 1812 only half the trees remained, and by 1959 forest cover was down to 14 percent and declining fast. Now it stood at 21 percent, and if people like Tony Perera had their way, that number would rise even higher.

As we toured, Tony kept up a running patter on some of the animals native to Humboldt that we weren't encountering. One was the bee hummingbird, the world's smallest bird, and the smallest frog in the world,
Eleutherodactylus iberia
. Then there was the largest insectivore in the world, the soledon, and elsewhere on the island, the smallest scorpion. Cuba also has one of the smallest owls (and once had the largest owl), as well as both tiny and giant bats. All of which raises the question: Why does nature go for extremes on islands?

Biogeographers and ecologists have been pondering this for many decades. In the early 1960s, J. Bristol Foster of the University of British Columbia theorized that reduced predation and competition on islands allow some species to expand into niches that would on the mainland be occupied by other species. In general there is less diversity on islands—they're often harder to reach—and over time that diversity diminishes through extinction until it finds an equilibrium with in-migration from the mainland. This was one of the conclusions of the great biologist E. O. Wilson, who with R. H. MacArthur published
Theory of Island Biogeography
in 1967. Curious about this phenomenon, I contacted Foster, Wilson and other biogeographers after my trip. As Wilson summed it up, the lack of diversity on islands “opens the door for ecological opportunity” for the resident species. Something like this happened on a global scale some 65 million years ago, when mammals invaded every niche formerly occupied by the giant herbivore-eating dinosaurs, according to a study published in
Science
in 2010.