ENVIRONMENT/DEVELOPMENT: Protecting Cuba’s ‘Green Garden’

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 3 2000 (IPS) - The small town of Ancón in western Cuba is the first to benefit from a sustainable development programme aimed at protecting the Viñales valley, increasingly threatened by a steady inflow of tourists.

The programme, financed by the Cuban state and the autonomous community of Canarias — Spain’s Canary Islands — is focusing, among other aspects, on consciousness-raising and education on the environment, and improving infrastructure and transport in the valley, located in the province of Pinar del Río, 200 kms from Havana.

Ancón, population 230, is located in the heart of the valley, which was declared a Cultural Landscape on the World Heritage list of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in November 1999.

The Viñales valley, promoted by tourism agencies as Cuba’s “green garden”, is a region of flat-topped hillocks, caves and underground rivers, which received more than 237,600 foreign visitors last year, of the total 1.6 million arrivals to Cuba.

But the number of visitors is actually considerably larger, because there is no way to count those tourists who avoid tour packages and try to get off the beaten path by driving out to the valley in rented cars, with the help of Cuban friends or unofficial paid guides.

Cubans often say that “visiting Cuba and not going to Havana, Varadero (the leading resort town) or Viñales is like not visiting Cuba.”

This valley of 394 square kms is home to an immense variety of species of flora and fauna, including cork palms (Mycrocycas calocoma), which experts consider a veritable living fossil.

The possible environmental impact of the uncontrolled rise in the flow of tourists does not worry local inhabitants, who see foreigners as a source of dollars and greater prosperity.

Elier Morejón, the forest ranger who runs the Ancón museum- house, located a few metres from the entrance to a cave which boasts — in his words — “the most beautiful underground river in Viñales,” told IPS that “if the tours continue to arrive in a controlled manner, I don’t think there will be problems.”

Since 1971, Morejón, who was born in the house (his family home, now converted into a museum) 56 years ago, has been the guardian of more than 4,000 hectares of forests. Like most of his neighbours, he is anxiously awaiting the results of the development project currently being implemented by Cuba and the provincial government of Spain’s Canary Islands.

“When will we get the bus?” asks a local woman in her thirties as she runs into Marta Rosa Acosta, an expert with the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment working in the province of Pinar del Río.

Transportation between Ancón and the town of Viñales, 15 kms apart, is one of the priorities to be addressed by the project “For Sustainable Development for People and Nature”, which in its second phase will be extended to other communities in the province.

The town of Ancón is made up of 53 houses lining both sides of the highway. Most local residents belong to a cooperative based mainly on coffee-growing and forestry activities, although this part of Cuba is better-known for its tobacco.

“They themselves determined their needs, based on which agreement was reached on the actions to be carried out in the framework of the programme, including workshops, seminars and forums to boost awareness on the environment,” said Acosta.

The programme is being funded with 96,000 dollars from the Canary Islands Development Foundation, and a Cuban government contribution of 40,000 pesos (on par with the dollar at the official exchange rate, or equivalent to 2,000 dollars according to the rate applied by the government exchange bureaus).

The project, the main objective of which is to improve the living standards of several rural communities, will also help create hiking trails in the 14,000-hectare Viñales National Park, one of the 36 protected areas in Pinar del Río.

“We want to achieve harmonic integration of the economy and the environment,” said Acosta. “The project includes the creation of the Viñales Valley Visitor Centre, which will have a conference room and an information booth, and will host the park administration, experts and guides.”

Acosta, who is working on a proposal for the Viñales valley to be named the seventh biosphere reserve in this Caribbean island nation, was charged by the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment with implementing the sustainable development programme.

Besides the plans for public transportation, the local residents of Ancón have received financing for creating or refurbishing installations like a community centre, primary school, medical clinic, and local government headquarters.

Among the novel aspects of the programme are support for a hydroponic project for raising organic vegetables, a waste treatment system, musical equipment for the community centre, and a telephone station.

The programme will help create new hiking paths for “ecotourists”, and search for ways to generate a “green- friendly” culture among local inhabitants who, said Acosta, are no more aware of the environment than the rest of Cuba’s population of 11 million.

A study carried out last year by the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment found that three percent of those interviewed knew nothing about the environment, 75 percent simply equated the term with “nature”, and only 22 percent had a broader conception of the term.

But Morejón believes there is environmental awareness in Cuba. “I have been doing this job for 29 years and I have not had a single forest fire. Between the hillocks, the forest remains humid, and here you almost never see poachers or people who come in to cut down trees without permission.”

The forest ranger recalls that when he was a boy, people from the United States would often come to the region looking for fossils. “I myself searched for fossils and gave them to the visitors.

“At that time, we didn’t know the value of things. But today things are different,” says Morejón, who over the years has become the guardian of the forest and Ancón’s most well-known resident.

His house-museum is visited by every tourist arriving to the town, and he is always ready to talk about the valley and give a tour of the rooms — and especially of the photos taken on Aug 29, 1959, when the family received a surprise visit from today’s President Fidel Castro.

Just eight months after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, Castro unexpectedly dropped in at the Morejón family’s modest home to talk about promoting tourism to the Viñales valley.

“This is my life, I’ll only leave here in a coffin,” says Morejón, who lived for a short time in Havana but says he greatly prefers Ancón, “that mountain over there, the river, and this house that is always open to the world.”