Cuba - Lonely Planet [53]
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ENDANGERED SPECIES
Due to habitat loss and persistent hunting by humans, many of Cuba’s animals and birds are listed as endangered species. These include the Cuban crocodile, a fearsome reptile that has the smallest habitat of any crocodile, existing only in the Zapata swamps and in the Lanier swamps on Isla de la Juventud. Other vulnerable species include the jutía, which was hunted mercilessly during the período especial (special period; Cuba’s new economic reality post-1991), when hungry Cubans tracked them for their meat (they still do – in fact, it is considered something of a delicacy); the tree boa, a native snake that lives in rapidly diminishing woodland areas; and the elusive carpintero real (ivory-billed woodpecker; see boxed text,), spotted after a 40-year gap in the Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt near Baracoa in the late 1980s, but not seen since.
The seriously endangered West Indian manatee, while protected from illegal hunting, continues to suffer from a variety of man-made threats, most notably from contact with boat propellers, suffocation caused by fishing nets and poisoning from residues pumped into rivers from sugar factories.
Cuba has an ambiguous attitude toward the hunting of turtles. Hawksbill turtles are protected under the law, though a clause allows for up to 500 of them to be captured per year in certain areas (Camagüey and Isla de la Juventud). Travelers will occasionally encounter tortuga (turtle) on the menu in places such as Baracoa. You are advised not to partake as these turtles may have been caught illegally.
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THE WORLD’S MOST SUSTAINABLE COUNTRY?
With its antiquated infrastructure and fume-belching city traffic, Cuba might not always seem like a font of innovative environmentalism. But in October 2006, in an environmental report entitled ‘The Living Planet,’ the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) named Castro’s struggling island nation as the only country in the world with sustainable development.
The WWF based its study on two key criteria: human welfare index (life expectancy, literacy and GDP) and ecological footprint (the amount of land needed to fulfill a person’s food and energy needs). Most countries failed to meet their sustainability requirements either because their ecological footprint was too high (the megaconsuming West), or their human welfare index was too low (the poverty-stricken countries of Africa and Asia). Cuba, with its excellent health and education indices and low rates of consumption, proved to be the only exception.
It would be naive to suggest that Cuba achieved its sustainability record through foresight alone. On the contrary, the Cubans are largely ecologists by necessity. The country’s sustainability credentials were first laid out in the Special Period when, shorn of Soviet subsidies and marginalized from the world economy by a US trade embargo, rationing and recycling measures were necessary to survive.
To their credit, the Cubans haven’t wavered since. Despite a car-ownership ratio of 28 per 1000 (the US is closer to 850 per 1000) and an almost total absence of chemical fertilizers, the country refused to take the easy route toward greater prosperity post–Special Period and, instead, quickly fell in with the new global environmental zeitgeist.
Before his much publicized health relapse, Fidel Castro named 2006 as the ‘Year of the Energy Revolution’ and gave out free new energy-efficient appliances to millions of Cuban households. Visit a Cuban casa particular these days and you’ll find that dinner is made in a pressure cooker, all the lightbulbs are LEDs and the once inefficient 1950s fridge has, more often than not, been replaced by a more ecofriendly (and quieter) Chinese model.
Similarly, both Havana and Santiago have recently received a whole new fleet of Chinese-made ‘bendy’ buses replacing the famously filthy camellos (metro buses) of yore. Suddenly people can breathe again.
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Plants
Cuba is synonymous with the palm tree; through