ENVIRONMENT-CUBA: The Colours are Returning to Mariel

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jun 3 2001 (IPS) - People still gaze in astonishment at the cement factory smokestacks that dominate the entrance to Mariel, a town near the capital of Cuba which has recuperated its natural colours after decades of being covered with a layer of grey dust.

The leaves turned green again with the first May showers; houses are beginning to look light blue, pink and green; and the trucks laden with grey dust no longer drive back and forth between the factory and the loading-bays.

“What came out of those smokestacks was a column of dust. Unbagged cement. You don’t see that anymore,” Oscar Espino, an official with Cuba’s ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, told IPS. “That doesn’t mean the emissions have been cut to nothing, but they have been greatly reduced.”

Espino, a journalist by profession, heads the ministry’s Environment Unit in the province of Havana, and was one of the officials in charge of an inspection operation that led to a temporary shutdown of Mariel’s cement factory.

The plant was closed on World Environment Day (Jun 5) last year, and reopened in March, after adopting measures that considerably cut emissions of particles, thus reducing the impact on the environment and the health of the local population.

“Between 60 and 70 tonnes of cement were released daily into the atmosphere. Now the levels are below the limits set by the European Union for developing countries,” said Espino.

According to the director of the cement company, Juan Luis Fonseca, dust emissions have been cut by a factor of 100, and the factory has been nominated this year for the National Environment Prize.

Mariel, located 50 kms west of Havana, took its place in history when hundreds of thousands of emigrants were allowed to ship out in 1980 through the local port, in the 20th century’s largest exodus of Cubans to the United States.

But aside from that dramatic event, Mariel is a tranquil town, whose economy revolves around the port, a thermoelectric plant and the cement factory, which began to operate in 1918 with U.S. technology.

After President Fidel Castro took power in 1959, and as ties with the socialist bloc led by the now-defunct Soviet Union grew strong, the old factory was replaced by a modern plant with technology from the former German Democratic Republic.

By the early 1990s, at the peak of the ongoing economic crisis that broke out in this Caribbean island nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the plant was in dire need of major investments to restore or replace its dust control system.

Although the clean-up efforts began in 1994, the necessary funds were not available until last year. Twenty-eight percent of the 18 million dollars invested in upgrading the factory went into environmental protection measures.

The cement mill’s electrofilters were upgraded and air control systems were installed, an oil pipeline was laid in, a conveyor belt was put in place from the factory to the loading-bays, and the problems with dredging the bay were solved.

Fonseca, an electrical engineer who has been working at the Mariel factory since 1974 and as its director for 13 years, said the plant now had an environmental policy in which community participation was a key factor.

“Incredible!” is the general reaction among local residents, who two months after the factory reopened have a hard time believing it is not all a dream from which they will wake up one morning to find their furniture covered once again with a fine coat of grey dust.

“I used to get an asthma attack just about every night, and when I didn’t have asthma, I would sneeze all day because of my allergies,” said Maricela Guzmán, 32. “Now, since there is less dust, I’m feeling much better.”

According to the National Office of Statistics, of the just over 42,000 people living in the municipality of Mariel as of late last year, 31,689 lived in town.

Until last year, the number of cases of acute and chronic respiratory ailments in Mariel was higher than the national average, due to the cement factory’s emissions.

The Public Health Ministry’s latest annual statistical report revealed that more than 4.9 million cases of respiratory illness were reported in 1998, or a rate of 441.6 per 1,000 inhabitants.

Espino said that when the inspection was carried out in Mariel, vegetation in the region was gradually suffocating under a coat of dust.

The microplankton and marine fauna in Mariel bay are still seriously affected by the accumulation of dust on the seabed, which is aggravated by the fact that the factory’s drainage system takes the run-off from the rainwater directly into the bay, he added.

A report by the ‘Agencia Ambiental Entorno Cubano’, a dissident environmental group, warned in 1998 that the cloud of dust issuing from the factory sometimes stretched as far as 14 kms.

A report on Cuba by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) described the situation as a “grave” case of air pollution.

In the United States, where more than 100 cement plants operated in 1999, emissions of toxic particles by cement mills are considered a cause of respiratory disease and cancer.

The temporary closure of the Mariel cement factory was one of the first measures applied in the province of Havana, after Decree Law 200 was passed in 1999 to crack down on polluters.

Last year, the Centre for Environmental Inspection and Management, which answers to the ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment, slapped sanctions on 110 legal entities, and shut down 11 companies due to their impact on the environment.

Silvia Alvarez, the director of the centre, told IPS that of the 1,098 licences applied for in 2000, 736 were granted and 12 have been denied so far, including one for the construction of a hotel on a key off the northern part of the island.

No work can begin on any Cuban or mixed capital venture without an environmental licence issued by the centre, which has been carrying out regular inspections of enterprises and natural ecosystems since the late 1990s.

“For now, we are trying to be flexible with older installations, and to recommend a series of measures before going to the extreme of closing them down,” said Jorge Alvarez, an expert at the centre.