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1Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica

DOI 10.15517/dre.v22i2.46955

CUBA BETWEEN HURRICANES:COMMODITY

FRONTIERS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES

Jean Stubbs

Abstract

In 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Caibarién, in north-central Cuba. Images

of a devastated forgotten coastal town catapulted to international prominence a

once-thriving port for the export of sugar and sponges, left in the shadows of

international tourism on the nearby keys. In 2019, a collaboration between the

Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project, the Antonio Núñez

Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity, and the Cuban Film Institute led to

lming a documentary in Cuba whose point of departure was Caibarién. The aim

was to combine an environmental and commodity frontiers approach to visualize

historical junctures and contemporary challenges in the context of global market

inequalities and accentuating climate change. Archival research underpinned

local testimonies and expert interviews, along with clips from newsreels,

documentaries, and feature lms, to produce Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes.

This article charts the project to lm the documentary;homes in on the paradoxes

of living rst with international tourism, Cuba’s most recent commodity frontier,

and then without, due to the Covid-19 perfect storm of a pandemic, likened to

a category 5 hurricane; and concludes reecting on documentary as a tool for

raising awareness during the pandemic.

Keywords: history, climate, tourism, documentary lmmaking, social inequality,

tertiary economy.

Fecha de recepción: 9 de mayo de 2021 • Fecha de aceptación: 10 de junio de 2021

Jean Stubbs • Investigadora adjunta, Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

(CLACS), Escuela de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad de Londres, Londres, Inglaterra.

Contacto: jean.stubbs@sas.ac.uk.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3853-9792

Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica2

CUBA ENTRE CICLONES: FRONTERAS MERCANTILES

Y DESAFÍOS AMBIENTALES

Resumen

En 2017, el Huracán Irma tocó tierra en Caibarién, norte-centro de Cuba. Volvió a

la mira internacional un olvidado - y devastado - pueblo costero que otrora había

prosperado como puerto para exportar azúcar y esponjas, para luego quedarse a

la sombra del nuevo turismo internacional en los cayos cercanos. Colaboración

entre el proyecto ‘Commodities of Empire’ de la Academia Británica, la

Fundación Antonio Núnez Jiménez para la Naturaleza y el Hombre y el Instituto

Cubano del Cine conllevó a lmar un documental cuyo punto de partida fue

Caibarién. La meta fue combinar un enfoque ambiental con ‘exportaciones en

frontera’ para visualizar coyunturas históricas y desafíos actuales en el contexto

de desigualdades del mercado internacional y creciente cambio climático.

Investigación de archivo se entretejó con testimonios expertos y opiniones

locales, cortes de noticieros, documentales y cine cción, para producir Cuba:

Vivir entre ciclones. Este artículo traza el proyecto de lmar del documental;

enfoca las paradojas de vivir primero con el turismo, la última ‘exportación de

frontera’ de Cuba, y luego sin, debido a la ‘perfecta tormenta’ de la pandemia de

Covid-19, comparada con un ciclón categoría 5; y concluye reexionando sobre

el documental como herramienta de concientización durante la pandemia.

Palabras clave: historia, clima, turismo, lmación documental, desigualdad social,

economía terciaria.

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 3

INTRODUCTION

In September 2017, Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful hurricanes to

sweep the Caribbean, made landfall in Caibarién, in north-central Cuba. Images

of the devastation of a forgotten coastal town were broadcast around the world,

bringing back to international prominence a port that had once thrived on exports

from its hinterland, especially sugar and, more latterly, sponges. Hurricanes have

impacted signicantly on the history of Caibarién and the surrounding region in

what is today Villa Clara, formerly Las Villas, province, where forests and food

self-sufciency had given way to cattle ranching, coffee estates, tobacco farms,

sugarcane plantations, and shing, and most recently international tourism; all

impacting on the environment and subject to global market dictates. The city of

Caibarién had long fallen into decline, except as a gateway to the newly ourishing

international beach resort tourism on the nearby keys.

The advent of Hurricane Irma gave rise to a 2019 initiative of the Commodities

of Empire British Academy Research Project (CoE) (commoditiesofempire.org.uk)

to work collaboratively in Cuba with the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for

Nature and Humanity (FANJ) (fanj.cult.cu/) and the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC)

(cubacine.cult.cu/).

The aim was to bring together environmental scientists,

conservationists, meteorologists, and community activists to produce a documen-

tary to explore how a history of extreme weather events, in tandem with succes-

sive commodity frontiers, had impacted on the natural environment and present-day

vulnerability, as well as the prospects for recovery and sustainability.

This article begins with the backstory to lming in Cuba and the issues

presented in the three parts of the documentary: hurricanes and history in Cuba; the

rise and decline of Caibarién; and an exploration of sustainable futures, homing in

on two initiatives in Artemisa province, one in reforestation and ecotourism and the

other in organic farming. It then focuses more specically on the impact of Cuba’s

most recent commodity frontier, international tourism, which, like everywhere else,

was brought to an abrupt halt by the Covid-19 pandemic.

While health was not dealt with in the lm, it came as no surprise to see

how Cuba rose to the pandemic challenge, nationally and internationally, sending

Cuban medics to provide their expertise around the world, and developing their

own biotechnology to trial vaccines. By 2019, foreign currency income from inter-

national tourism was only surpassed by remittances from primarily U.S.-based

Cuban émigrés and that generated by medics serving abroad. Remittances were

severely curtailed by successive measures on the part of the Trump administration

to tighten the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and by Covid. Changes of government in

countries such as Brazil and Ecuador also spelled the end of medical exchanges

and the expulsion of Cuban medics there, though some were subsequently rein-

stated. This accorded even greater importance to the rise and demise of interna-

tional tourism and its environmental consequences

Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica4

The article concludes by reecting on this in the context of (forcibly online)

documentary screenings during the pandemic, as a tool for raising awareness of not

only issues raised in the documentary but also developments since.

BUILDING COLLABORATION

From its inception in 2007, CoE has built up a global research network studying

how commodities have circulated within, between, and beyond empires, especially

from the nineteenth century to the present. A priority was to enable researchers to

network across the Global South and North, to further the comparative understanding

of local and global change over time. As vulnerability and conict over commodities

and resources are increasingly evidenced in many parts of the world, a focus on inter-

linking systems, agents, and circuits in the movement and impact of commodities

aimed to situate historically the drivers of contemporary globalization.

CoE has contributed to new areas of debate, one of which is around the

concept of commodity frontiers. Moore (2000, 2015) posited commodity frontiers

as integral to the very history of capitalism over the past ve centuries, in which

humanity has had a signicant impact on the earth’s geology and ecosystems,

creating a metabolic rift. In successive commodity frontiers, new land, natural

resources, and labor have been harnessed into production for global trade and

consumption, shifting over time and from one location to the next. Vast areas of the

world’s natural environment have been recast in a trend to environmental degrada-

tion, food scarcity, and social fracture.

The commodity frontiers approach homes in on the proliferation of extractive

economies in geologically and climatically distinct ecosystems at ever-greater

distances and across broader spaces, creating frontier processes of transformation

and leaving in their wake communities more vulnerable to extreme climate events

and ‘natural’ hazards (Barbier, 2011; Joseph, 2019). CoE was involved in early

discussions leading to the creation of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI),

whose Commodity Frontiers Journal is available on open access on the CFI website

(commodityfrontiers.com/).

In 2016 a joint CoE/CFI workshop was held in London on commodity fron-

tiers, environmental change, and sustainable development. Cuban environmental

historian Funes Monzote (2004, 2020) and sugar historian Zanetti Lecuona (2009,

2018) were invited to participate in the workshop and other collateral meetings,

laying the foundations for future collaboration. As part of CoE’s audiovisual

strategy to make research ndings accessible to wider audiences, historians whose

work has encompassed the history of sugar and tobacco in Villa Clara, as well

as contemporary landmark turning-points for Cuba (Curry-Machado, 2005, 2011;

Stubbs, 1985, 1989), teamed up with a documentary lmmaker who has a track

record of lming in Cuba and has published on Cuban cinema (Chanan, 2004),

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 5

to work with Funes Monzote and Zanetti Lecuna on a low-budget documentary

with FANJ, ICAIC, and local Caibarién environmental activist, journalist and

writer González Reinoso (2012).

Over recent years there has been a greater appreciation of the longue-durée

connections between hurricanes and political, economic, and socio-cultural change

globally (Ross, 2017) and how the Caribbean has been shaped historically as much

by hurricanes as by diplomacy, commerce, or colonial rule (Schwartz, 2015). In the

Cuban context, a pioneer study documented how major hurricanes, notably in the

1840s, shaped developments in Cuba under Spanish colonial rule (Pérez, 2001); two

historians who subsequently participated in the project extended their historical anal-

ysis of the impact of weather-induced environmental crises over earlier and later time

frames (Johnson, 2011; Ramos Guadalupe, 2009); and other studies documented

hurricanes historically (Pérez Suárez, Limia Martínez & Vega González, 2010) and

in contemporary times (González Herrera & Fernández Díaz, 2007; Messina, Royce

& Spreen, 2008; Núñez Velis, 2010; Rubiera, 2013).

Of particular interest in the Cuban case was to trace the connections between

commodities, hurricanes, climate, and the environment during the nineteenth century,

when Cuba was still part of the waning Spanish empire (until 1898); through the

following U.S. neo-colonial period (1898-1958); and across the post-1959 Revolu-

tion era. From the 1960s to the 1980s, faced with U.S. hostility and embargo, and

committed as it became to a model of socialist development, Cuba’s revolutionary

government forged close ties with the former Soviet Union. After the 1991 implosion

of the Soviet Union, by then its major trading partner, Cuba was catapulted into the

crisis called its Special Period in Times of Peace. The crisis was further exacerbated

by heightened U.S. hostility and extra-territoriality of the embargo, and up to this

day Cuba has had to strategize around this.

Despite such adverse international junctures, Cuba today ranks high on a range

of education, health, and environmental indicators. In 2015, it topped the newly

created global Sustainable Development Index (sustainabledevelopmentindex.org/),

evidencing high social performance and low ecological impact (Hickel, 2020).

Possibly in part a by-product of this, alongside country case studies of more glaring

developmental and environmental urgency in Latin America and the Caribbean,

Cuba has often not been included in otherwise excellent recent environmental

edited collections (Alimonda, Toro Pérez & Martín, 2017; Coletta & Raftopoulos,

2016; De Castro, Hogenboom & Baud, 2016) and global collaborations such as

Environmental Justice (ejatlas.org/). While there have been some notable excep-

tions in regional environmental history that have included Cuba (Funes Monzote,

2008), the importance of looking more closely at the Cuban case was highlighted

in 2017, when there was far more extensive international coverage of how Hurri-

cane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, and of Hurricane Irma elsewhere in the Carib-

bean, with relatively little of Irma’s impact on Cuba.

Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica6

LIVING BETWEEN HURRICANES

The international, regional, and national backdrop of awareness, policy, and

action designed to mitigate coastal vulnerability rendered of particular interest how

this might be manifest at the local level. Caibarién could thus serve as a valuable

starting point for learning from the past to help ensure a more environmentally, as

well as economically and socially sustainable future, and for exploring the local

alongside the national, regional, and global initiatives. The challenge was how to

visualize this engagingly, and the documentary approaches this didactically: drawing

on archival research to underpin expert testimony and local opinion, and incorpo-

rating clips from newsreels, documentaries, and feature lms, in its aim to appeal

to diverse audiences across educational, community and policy-making circles, and

thus contribute to the local and global discussion.

Featured early in the documentary is a one-day workshop hosted by FANJ in

June 2019, which was attended by several of the lm’s participants. Leading mete-

orologist at Cuba’s National Institute of Meteorology, Armando Caymares, began

by detailing the trajectory and intensity of Irma, and also its stationary nature over

Caibarién. In his words: “From a scientic point of view, it was a completely symmet-

rical hurricane, well-formed like a symmetrical rock. The temperature peaked at least

80 degrees Celsius, making it such a powerful hurricane.”

An interesting exchange followed when Pedro González Reinoso, from the

viewpoint of having lived all his life in Caibarién, interjected that “curiously, there

was more damage to buildings and more social trauma caused by Hurricane Kate

[1985], which came through unexpectedly in the middle of the night, than by Irma.

With Irma, everyone was better prepared.” Caymares responded by pointing out how

much meteorology had advanced since then, in Cuba and globally: “There weren’t

the satellites or methods of observation we now have”, he said. “I’ve been working

for 35 years, and I’ve seen a transformation from classic synoptic meteorology to

cyber meteorology, computerized meteorology, as in medicine.” The technological

advance spans 70 local weather stations across Cuba, which record and share data

nationally and internationally, enabling greater preparedness.

With Irma, there was heavy damage to the grid and telephone network, as

several installations were swept away by the strength of the winds. And yet, in

the testimony of Alejandro Morf, a local Caibarién speleology enthusiast, when

interviewed later for the documentary: “Much of the recovery was very quick. For

example, the collection of rubbish, of debris, none of that took long. The elec-

tricity was restored in sixteen days.” Housing, public buildings, factories, and

warehouses, however, remained seriously damaged.

Broadening the scope, Enrique Ramos Guadelupe, basing himself on his earlier

historical study of Cuba, referred to hurricanes documented in the chronicles of early

navigators and conquistadores and how over time, with plantations covering large

expanses of land and industry, the impact of hurricanes caused increasing economic

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 7

damage as well as human loss. As he explained, “The north-central zone of Cuba, the

zone of Remedios, of Caibarién, is a classic example of that double impact.” Sugar

cane, he went on to say, is particularly vulnerable to the impact of the wind and rain:

“The cane falls, it is practically knocked down to the ground, and that makes the task of

cutting harder, requiring greater effort, and much of the cane is lost”. And in the case

of tobacco, “it’s not just the plant, but also the harvested tobacco in the drying barns”.

Likewise basing herself on her historical work, Sherry Johnson then illus-

trated how hurricanes of the 1840s virtually wiped out coffee to the advantage

of sugar, which could recover more quickly, and how sequential bad weather in

the 1860s helped throw tobacco into crisis. She explained the effects of hurri-

cane disturbance and heavy rains caused by the phenomenon known as El Niño

in contrast to the droughts caused by La Niña. A century earlier, in 1775, drought

conditions in the north coastal region where we would be lming were the cause of

a cattle disease that hit ranching hard. Conversely, as recorded in Cuban newsreel

coverage, it was rain that devastated the coffee belt around Havana in 1968 and in

1983 hit Cuba’s sugar and tobacco harvests hard.

There is a backdrop of political, economic, and social history. Cuba’s nine-

teenth-century expansion of coffee, sugar, and slavery took off after the Revolu-

tion of 1798-1804 in Saint Domingue, during which French exploitation of both

commodities was cut short. Tobacco also took off as Cuba opened to free trade after

Spain ended its monopoly there in 1817, albeit retaining Cuba as a Spanish colony.

Of these three commodities, sugar would become prevalent. As sugar plantations

grew in size, they became more centralized and industrialized, with huge steam

mills serviced by a rail network, technologically modern for their time, but worked

by slave and contract labor and accompanied by the mass destruction of Cuba’s

natural forests. In the words of Reinaldo Funes Monzote, “the biggest transforma-

tion of the Cuban landscape is due to sugarcane”. Wood was used for construction

and fuel, causing the depletion of the soil biodiversity that had for centuries been

stored in the forests, which the cane, in turn, depleted further.

Since the early nineteenth century, Cuba has experienced the rise and fall of

three cane sugar frontiers, each linked to political developments. Under Spanish colo-

nial rule, Cuba rose to account for 40% of the world’s sugar - and continued to be the

world’s largest sugar producer until the 1920s - but was badly hit in the latter part

of the nineteenth century during the dual struggle for the abolition of slavery (1886)

and independence from Spain (1898). In the early decades of twentieth-century U.S.

dominance, U.S. sugar companies forged a second sugar frontier, recruiting migrant

labor from neighboring Caribbean countries, especially Haiti and Jamaica, to expand

production in eastern Cuba. In the 1920s, Cuba still accounted for around a third of the

world’s production of cane sugar, and 20-25% of total world sugar output. Competition

from other producers then increased. Internationally, beet sugar had started to undercut

cane sugar from the mid-nineteenth century on, though cane sugar still accounted for

some two thirds of global sugar production during the rst half of the twentieth century.

Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica8

Sugar would continue to dominate the Cuban economy through the 1950s,

and its very dominance along with increasing labor unrest fed insurrection. After the

revolution, there was a brief attempt to diversify away from sugar dependency, but

from the mid-1960s until the 1980s, a nationalized sugar sector was rebuilt, creating

a third frontier expansion, primarily for export to the Soviet Union in what became

known as the oil-for-sugar swap. When this ended in the early 1990s, and Cuba was

left without oil and with an outdated mill infrastructure and technology, when world

market prices for sugar were at an all-time low, the government decided to close

down half the country’s sugar mills as being uneconomical to run. In the documen-

tary, Oscar Zanetti Lecuona encapsulated the rise and demise of this third frontier:

Cuban sugar production continued increasing at a time when production was prac-

tically paralyzed throughout the Caribbean - and even disappeared, as in the case of

Puerto Rico. This was because of the connection with the Soviet market, and of the

other European socialist countries. As a result, while under capitalism, in the 1950s

the average sugar harvest was around ve million tons; in the 1980s, it was around

eight million tons... The Cuban industry grew during the 1970s and 1980s. It had

become mechanized, above all because of the exceptionally elevated prices that the

Soviet Union paid. This was not out of charity, but because the cost of producing

beet sugar in the Soviet Union was very high; and so even when they bought Cuban

sugar for three, four or even ve times the price of sugar on the world market, it

was a good deal for them... When the Soviet Union disappeared... Cuba had to turn

to the international sugar market.... to sell its sugar at a price that could be three

times less than what it was being sold at two years previously, with production

costs that were increasing. But production was maintained largely because it was

the only source of income that the country had. But while the 1989/90 harvest was

in the region of eight million tons, in 1994 only four million tons were produced.

The economic and sociocultural impact of this was traumatic. While closing

as far as possible the less productive and more technologically outdated sugar mills,

and aiming to spread the closures as fairly as possible across the country, in the

Remedios-Caibarién region only one of the 24 sugar mills was left functioning.

Whole sugar mill communities lost their livelihood overnight, buildings sank

into decay, and old and young were left reeling in what some referred to as worse

than a hurricane coming through. Ana Vera Estrada (2012) in the documentary high-

lighted: “There was signicant technical potential, young graduates from vocational

schools, and also university level, who had trained for specialist work in the sugar

industry”. After the industry disappeared, some found work in the tourist sector,

leaving behind them derelict buildings and communities of older vulnerable people.

Others who stayed took up options for leasing and clearing state-owned land previ-

ously given over to sugar, often by then overrun by sickle bush, to grow root crops,

vegetables, and fruit, primarily to meet local needs, propelling an about-turn from

large-scale state agriculture to small peasant production.

Four of the mills closed were transformed into sugar museums, all four near

to areas designated ‘tourism poles’, one of them on the outskirts of Caibarién, on the

main road to the nearby keys. The museum bears testimony to greatness in its time,

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 9

with brightly painted rolling stock of industrial plant and steam locomotives that once

plied the rail network, receiving the sugarcane and conveying the processed sugar to

the nearby rum distillery and the coast. Target visitors included groups of tourists on

guided coach tours from hotels on the keys, by-passing Caibarién itself, which was left

crying out for greater synergy. Environmentalist Armando Fernández Soriano (2005)

poignantly drew attention in the documentary to how Caibarién, in tandem with other

‘satellite’ towns near beach tourist resorts, such as Cardenás, near Varadero, further

west along the same stretch of the north coast, had been left relegated:

All these small coastal settlements could have an economic reactivation if the

connections between public policy and tourism could be a bit more dynamic...

One of the biggest problems for local development, of the localities that are

peripheral to the tourism poles, is precisely that the tourism pole attracts most

of the investment and most of the labor. That is, people move to where they can

earn money to live a little better. And activity decreases in these communities.

This is a phenomenon that is not only happening in Caibarién.

What was happening to Caibarién had not gone unnoticed. Gonzalez Herrera

(2015) was among those who had been based in the Center for Tourism Studies at the

Universidad Central Marta Abreu de Las Villas, located in the provincial capital of

Santa Clara, directing theses, conducting, and publishing studies. Their ndings argued

strongly for an integral approach to tourism, which embraced environmentalism and

especially investment in the architectural and cultural heritage of Caibarién, along

with Remedios, as an essential complement to the beach resorts on the keys (González

Herrera, Gómez Estévez, Uría Arbolase, García González, & Iglesias Montero, 2006;

González Herrera & Iglesias Montero, 2009). Some investment would belatedly come

to Remedios but little to Caibarién, other than that from overseas remittances, the north

coast of Villa Clara having had one of the highest recent emigration rates in the country.

This had at least helped some local people embellish their own homes, open small

home-restaurants and cafés, and provide accommodation. Many municipal buildings,

however, had either fallen into neglect or been torn apart by extreme weather events.

Caibarién’s nineteenth-century development coincided with Cuba’s sugar

boom, not so much with production - it only had the one nearby mill - but with the

export of sugar from the Remedios area, for which the railroad was instrumental

(Venegas, 2009; Zanetti & García Alvarez, 1987). Caibarién saw its heyday in the

1920s and would recoup after the 1930s depression, though not to its previous level.

Fishing and the export of sponges (Clarence-Smith, 2020) replaced some of sugar’s

glory, though these became depleted. According to Abel Arnaldo González López –

a Caibarién-born psychologist who at the time of lming was living in Havana and

working as a tourist guide - the high-quality sponges that were considered among the

largest in the world in their day and sponge shing came to an end basically because the

sponges were, in his words on the screen, “in danger of extinction”. González Reinoso

also remembered “seeing the docks full of those sponges that were monstrously big,

which they cut up with scissors, to make smaller for export” and added: “Sponges,

Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica10

like corals, began to suffer deterioration in their proliferation due to the pollution of

the sea, and the rise in temperatures. They are sensitive, like the corals, to all those

adverse conditions that have been ruining some parts of the ecosystem.”

González López depicted the history of Caibarién with a strong commercial

class and, also, a strong worker tradition. In its heyday, it boasted hotels, interna-

tional banks, cinemas, and theatres, the last of which collapsed under the impact

of Irma; and a craft industry once produced mosaic tiles. Zanetti Lecuona similarly

described the period as “one of splendor for the city, not just architecturally but also

with the visits of intellectuals and scientists”. González Reinoso spoke of Spanish

poet Federico García Lorca and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, two epic gures of

Hispanic and Hispanic American literature, visiting Caibarién in the early 1930s.

A later watershed for Caibarién would come in the 1970s, when bulk sugar

shipping was introduced in Cuba. An earlier attempt in 1950s Havana had failed

due to strong worker opposition. In the 1970s, however, with the increased scale

and mechanization of the industry nationally, this was deemed necessary and meant

Cienfuegos, given its size and deepwater bay on the south coast, would supplant

Caibarién as the major sugar port for central Cuba.

Today only derelict remains of warehouses and wharves line the old port area,

alongside a small shing cooperative, and a couple of huge sponges can only be seen in

a local museum. The nearby beach has suffered, too. As González Reinoso explained:

The beach’s existing structures were demolished. It had walls that divided it

into segments - based on a very old study showing that with articial sands

on improvised beaches, the only way to stop the waves eroding the sand, is

the construction of containing walls.

The beach had been socially as well as physically divided in the past, with a

part for the private Yacht Club, another for the military, and a third part for the poor

and blacks. While welcome socially, the removal of the containing walls had reper-

cussions in that the sand is continually washed away and has to be replenished.

The coast is also polluted with contamination owing downriver from sugar

mills still functioning in the region, the Mulata rum distillery, and even from the local

hospital since the waste-disposal plant stopped working and has yet to be repaired, and

a large amount of sediment is accumulating on the coast. At the same time, Caibarién

is among 70 coastal settlements most affected by sea-level rise, and among 20 that will

be seeing the most impact within 50-80 years. The sea level rose by about a meter with

Irma, though, as Morf pointed out, for all people criticize the recently built Caibarién

seawall, “it acted like a breakwater holding back the waves”. However, he also went

on to say, the sea level is rising in periods of non-extreme weather events, a change

which is upon us, not in “thousands of years, nothing like that, but rather decades, so

any young person now will experience the impact of the rising sea level. More than 30

percent of Caibarién’s coast is going to disappear in a matter of decades.”

Hurricane Irma lashed into the causeway from Caibarién to the hotels on the

keys. Up to km10, and bridge no.6, the damage was minor, mainly to the containing

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 11

barrier and the northern side of the breakwater, but leaving it impassable for access

to the keys. The damage compounded questions that had been raised environmen-

tally. González López recalled:

When I heard that they were going to make the causeway, I said that it was going

to have an impact on the biosphere. They tried to reduce this, having had the

experience of the Bay of Los Perros, and the causeway that was built between

the north of Ciego de Avila and Cayo Coco. They built some 48km of road and

49 bridges… They foresaw that having the bridges would allow the marine

currents to ow, and so the impact was less. But there is always an impact… and

the ecosystems that are weakest, most fragile, or most vulnerable, are partially

or completely affected by the strongest. Of course, you also have to consider

the conditions the country was in at that time. It was a special situation… The

economy collapsed almost 40% in barely four or ve years. Tourism was to be

the great engine driving the economy, bringing hard currency into the country.

There is, of course, an irony to this. In the Caribbean, many associate tourism

with the plantation era, a legacy of colonialism, the same dependent relationship

between poor and rich countries, and, in the words of Funes Monzote: “tourism has

an enormous environmental cost because of the ow of materials and energy for

journeys. Bringing people to the Caribbean costs a lot.” Originally the Caribbean

exported calories. “Now we have to think how many calories are needed to bring all

this tourism infrastructure… food imports… demand for water.”

Alternative smaller-scale forms of tourism have evolved, including ecotourism,

as at Las Terrazas, west of Havana, featured in the third part of the documentary, where

major reforestation and local community project was initiated back in 1968. Environ-

mental concerns predate Fidel Castro’s impassioned speech to the 1992 Earth Summit in

Rio de Janeiro, but equally that speech boosted environmental thinking and practice in

Cuba (Castro, 1994; Temas, 1997, 2013). The strictures of the 1990s Special Period also

engendered new initiatives of sustainable organic farming (Funes Aguilar & Vázquez

Moreno, 2016; Rosset & Benjamin, 1994; Wright, 2009). Among those in Cuba who

took up this mantra is Fernando Funes Monzote, a trained agronomist and since 2012 an

organic small farmer. He spoke eloquently when lmed at his farm, Santa Marta:

[T]he world is now living through a Special Period. There are many reasons why

we need change in the world’s agricultural system, and it is necessary - not only

in Cuba, but in every country of the world - to rethink.... not only how food is

produced, but how agriculture connects with the rest of society. And there are

many people working on this. Many people around the world, from their own

communities, with their own difculties and their own problems, not only related

to technology and how food is produced but, also economic and social changes.

And also the impact climate change has had... Access to water. Prolonged droughts.

The passing of hurricanes or tornados, and different climatic events that affect

agriculture, are no more than a response by nature to the bad management of

these natural resources. If we succeed in establishing agricultural systems that

are more respectful of the environment, but which are also more socially viable,

equal, and fair, then we can think of the world having a sustainable future.

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A geologist by training and an avid advocate for environmental education, Manuel

Iturralde (n.d.) elaborated on the historic contradiction between society and nature:

Society... occupies a space and... upsets the environment... There was a time in

which there was the false concept that [nature] was there for us to make use of.

That is a commodity that I can use whenever I want. I pull down that mountain,

and we fabricate all the cement that the world needs, to make another mountain

of cement, of concrete. We dig deeply to bring out all the resources of the Earth...

But if we modify the environment in which we live too much, then the point will

be reached in which the environment becomes hostile for us. And it is our fault.

FANJ President Liliana Núñez Velis (Núñez Velis & Sánchez, 2018) exhorted

us to understand that we must be active citizens, “searching for solutions based on

nature, and not confronting nature”, something she feels has not been fully taken on

board in any system, socialist and capitalist, although it is accentuated more under

capitalism, given the strength of consumerism”. Against a backdrop of many attempts

at geotransformation in Cuba (see Núñez Jiménez, 2018), she made a strong case for

“much that can be learned, for example, from traditional construction and practices

more in harmony with the environment”. One of the main tasks facing FANJ, as she

sees it, is to build on the excellent work of Cuba’s Civil Defense disaster management

and extend this to preparing all sectors and levels of the government, the economy,

and society for greater environmental awareness and action.

LIVING WITH TOURISM

Hurricane Irma demonstrated graphically that tourism is a sector in which at all

levels the need for environmental awareness and action is paramount. The Caribbean

Leeward Islands were hit rst, when Irma was a category 5 hurricane, with catastrophic

damage in Barbuda, Saint Barthélemy, Sint Maarten, Anguilla, and the British Virgin

Islands. It weakened to category 4 as it hit Culebra and Vieques Islands, northwest of

the Puerto Rican mainland, and passed south of Turks and Caicos Islands to atten

Little Inagua in the Bahamas. It then built up again to category 5, making initial land-

fall on Cayo Romano, off the northeast coast of Cuba. It moved westerly along Cuba’s

north coast keys, reducing in intensity, then becoming almost stationary, with winds

of over 200kms and lashing rain, when it reached the mainland over Caibarién. In its

wake, it left ooded coastal settlements, ripped-up vegetation, and buildings in various

states of collapse. This included the many resorts on the north coast keys, where a

clean-up and recovery operation was rapidly put into action in preparation for Cuba’s

peak international tourism season due to start just two months later in November.

Navarro Jurado (2011) delineated four phases of tourism in Cuba: pre-revo-

lutionary tourism 1902-1958, domestic tourism 1959-1970, territory-wide tourism

reactivation 1970-1989, and foreign-investment-led international tourism with

primarily Spanish hotel investment (post-1990). He also highlighted a vicious cycle

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 13

of ‘mature’ destinations, akin to what tourism experts such as Butler (2006) had by

the late 1970s identied as the Tourism Area Life Cycle (seen by some as averaging

25 years): from a pre-tourism era of exploration; through domestic and international

development, consolidation and stability; to stagnation and either a post-tourism

era or rejuvenation. Turning points and critical junctures are linked to ecology and

product life cycle, especially when the tourism destination is developed without

consideration for its future preservation, thus leading to issues of sustainability of

the environment and quality of life for residents and tourists alike. Linked to this

are limits of acceptable change, carrying capacity for sustainable management, and

Quality of Life, as highlighted in the case of Cuba, according to Beardsley (2016).

Tourism in Cuba was given a particular boost in the 1920s, when it attracted

those seeking to escape U.S. prohibition laws on drinking, and by the 1950s casi-

no-type tourism was contributing to a peak of over a quarter of a million, mainly

U.S. visitors (Schwartz, 1997). In the early years after 1959, tourism was down-

played, though started to develop again nationally as of the 1970s, when the Insti-

tute of Tourism was set up, and internationally as of the 1990s, with the creation of

the Ministry of Tourism (MINTUR) and tourism designated as a key strategy for

rapid national recovery and development.

Depending on tourism for development has had its advocates and detractors,

among them Barberia (2002), Espino (1993), Feinberg & Newfarmer (2016), Figueras

(2004), Hall (1992) and Perelló Cabrera (2019). Positive ventures singled out have

been the Havana City Historian’s Ofce restoration of Old Havana, which acquired

UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1982, replicated on a smaller scale with the

restoration of Trinidad (acquiring UNESCO status in 1988) and other cities down the

island; and the Sierra del Rosario, including Las Terrazas and the Soroa Botanical

Orchid Garden, accorded UNESCO Biosphere status in 1984. Foreign investment,

however, went mostly to develop all-inclusive beach resort tourism, overwhelming

all other forms of city, nature, events, and health tourism. The all-inclusive resort

tourism might have seemed the best for short-term return, but, as pointed out by

many, ran the risk of high consumption of resources, loss of tourism attraction, and

irreparable damage to geosystems (Salinas Chávez & Salinas Chávez, 2017).

Except for a downturn in the global recession of 2008, Cuba’s international

tourism grew exponentially to four and a half million visitors in 2019. By then,

tourism had long outanked sugar, having grown from accounting for only 6% of

Cuba’s balance-of-payments income in the early 1990s - when sugar accounted for

70-75% - to 43% in 2015. As in the rest of the Caribbean, beach tourism, in partic-

ular, was heavily dependent on the seasonal preferences of principally Western

Europeans and Canadians escaping their winters, creating marked high and low

seasons in the eight main resort regions identied as tourism poles. While on the

increase, visitor numbers from Latin America and further aeld, such as Asia and

Eastern Europe, and for alternative forms, such as home-stays and cultural and

ecotourism, remained small by comparison.

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MINTUR from the outset declared that the potential of international tourism

to generate large returns quickly should also be sustainable, not at the expense of

society or the environment. Cuba’s national environmental framework was simul-

taneously developed in tandem with international and regional initiatives under

the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (CITMA) and is

considered today one of the most robust in the world. By 1997, CITMA had launched

its National Environmental Strategy and Territorial Environment Strategies. Environ-

mental Law 81 set out a framework for marine and land environmental management,

including Decree-Law No 201 for a National System of Protected Areas, ranging

from Protected Areas of National Signicance, Protected Areas of Local Signi-

cance, and Special Areas of Sustainable Development, and Decree-Law 212, which

delimits the coast zone, bars construction 40 meters from the coastline and regu-

lates sustainability of the coastline and communities living there. Protected areas

of land and sea with a marine-coastal component are subject to permitted levels of

conservation and activity. Ensuring protection in practice has yet to catch up with

such laudable goals, but Cuba nonetheless has some 25% of its marine waters under

protection, placing it among the world’s top nations.

That Cuba’s mass tourism development came later than in the rest of the Carib-

bean and Central and South American region meant it was possible to learn from

many of the most detrimental effects visible elsewhere, avoid the homogenization

other destinations have experienced by creating a more diverse built environment,

and pass laws to protect areas to nurture a wealth of biodiversity in terrestrial and

marine ecosystems. The tourism strategy was not, however, devoid of sociocultural

and environmental impacts. Varadero replicated the large hotels on the beach all too

often seen elsewhere, and Cuba now has one of the highest levels of all-inclusive

resorts in the Caribbean. Tourism enclaves of plenty amidst a shortage economy and

growing inequality brought unwanted spinoffs along with class, race, and gender

lines, including a resurgence of sex tourism that drew an early barrage of attention.

Perhaps the greatest failure in planning for the natural environment was in

the 1980s, when the 20km causeway was built from the mainland to the chain of

keys (one of which is Cayo Romano, where Irma hit rst) off the north coast of

Sancti Spíritus and Camagüey provinces, and destroyed the ecosystem by blocking

the tidal ow. The causeway was retted with bridges, or cuts, allowing water to

circulate and enable signicant recovery. It was a lesson heeded when it later came

to building the causeway to the keys off the north coast of Villa Clara, in the region

of Caibarién, though neither has that been without impact.

Due to its later pace of development coupled with strong environmental laws,

an extensive network of protected areas, and strong government commitment to

environmental protection, leaving a wealth of biodiversity and healthy terrestrial and

marine ecosystems, Cuba has been seen as less vulnerable to the levels of commod-

ication affecting many Caribbean destinations. Nonetheless, in 2017 gures, Cuba

was importing 60-70% of foods, whereby tourism was competing with local needs;

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 15

60% of commercially valuable sh stocks were in decline and one-third overexploited,

and overshing was a major factor in the demise of coral reefs. Moreover, mass

tourism increased the energy demand when Cuba’s energy needs are primarily met

by importing oil. Before 1959, Cuba’s oil was in the hands of U.S. companies; from

the 1960s to the 1980s oil came from the Soviet Union; and in the aftermath of the

1990s supplies were forthcoming from Venezuela, itself the target of U.S. hostility

and restrictions, such that supplies increasingly started to dwindle. With only around

4% of Cuba’s energy coming from renewable sources, the implementation of Cuba’s

Green Energy Development Programme will be crucial. Most of Cuba’s renewable

energy is biofuel, largely derived from sugarcane bagasse, while solar, biomass,

hydroelectric, and wind energy projects remain small by comparison.

There has been increasing support for ecotourism, to manage resources to

promote biodiversity and ecological as well as economic and socio-cultural needs,

helping local communities to help themselves become more resilient. In the words of

one recent study: “Robust economic valuation of Cuba’s natural resources, in combi-

nation with strong community engagement, will be essential to ensure the long-

term protection of Cuba’s ecosystems” (Mooney Walton, Hughen, Guggenheim &

Escobar-Fadul, 2018, p.117). In this vein, the Las Terrazas ecotourism developed in

tandem with a major reforestation and community project featured in the documen-

tary exemplies what can be achieved with national planning and local input.

Ever since Hurricane Flora took Cuba by surprise in 1963, ravaging eastern and

east-central Cuba, leaving a death toll of 1,000 and many more injured and displaced,

disaster-management measures put in place have led to what has become an excellent

Civil Defense rapid-response capability. Evacuation and other preventive measures

have ensured the minimal loss of life, and major state recovery operations have guar-

anteed to restore electricity and other supplies in record time (Kirk, 2017).

And yet, in 2017 Hurricane Irma came as a new wakeup call. Earlier that year,

an all-encompassing major national plan called Project Life (Tarea Vida) was adopted,

one that had been a decade in the making and is designed to take pre-emptive action

in light of climate change with a view to 2030 natural resource and environment

objectives for sustainable development. In the words of Dalia Salabarría Fernández,

a marine biologist at the National Center for Protected Areas, “Cuba learned a very

important lesson”, and she was echoed by Orlando Rey Santos, head of CITMA’s envi-

ronment division, who declared: “Irma indicated to everybody that we need to imple-

ment Project Life in a much more rapid way” (quoted in Stone, 2018).

With thousands of kilometers of low-lying coast in the path of Caribbean

hurricanes, seen to be intensifying with climate change, Irma lent new urgency to

the measures driving Project Life. These include prohibiting the construction of new

homes in threatened coastal areas, relocating people from communities threatened

by rising sea levels, shifting crop production away from saltwater-contaminated

areas, and prioritizing the need to strengthen coastal defenses and restore degraded

habitat to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities. According to CITMA,

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seawater rise will submerge and contaminate whole swathes of land, unless mitigated

by coastal engineering, restoring endangered mangroves, repairing coral reefs

exposed to industrial waste, and convincing people to relocate. Priorities are also to

adapt agricultural practice and thereby improve food security, given both sea level

rise and also heavy rainfall and ooding oscillating with drought, by improving soils,

diversifying crops, and introducing strains more resistant to temperature rise.

For the cash-strapped Cuban government, it is undoubtedly an ambitious

plan, requiring signicant investment. A widespread conviction remains that

tourism is still the sector best equipped to revitalize other productive sectors of the

Cuban economy and thus improve the welfare of society as a whole. As 2017 drew

to a close, the most signicant outcome, after having had to deal with the ravages

of Hurricane Irma, was that rapid recovery from the damage to tourist facilities

meant the high season could get off to a start in mid-November. Yet Irma had also

made it obvious that goals of sustainability and adaptation to climate change were

essential for the future development of tourism itself.

Project Life priorities for the tourist sector are directed at preserving beaches,

coasts and sea-beds; eliminating tourist facilities on, and restoring damaged sand

dunes; preserving mangroves; adressing the structural vulnerability of heritage

buildings; encouraging the reuse of water for irrigation of golf courses, hotel and

resort lawns; and increasing the use of renewable energy sources. After Irma, the

government aimed to spend at least $40 million on Project Life and approached

overseas donors for help. Italy was the rst to respond pledging $3.4 million to the

initiative in November 2017, an appeal went out to the Netherlands to lend its exper-

tise in coastal engineering, and bids were drawn up for further international support.

The challenge with tourism had been how to create greater synergies with the

rest of the economy and society and to work with communities for local environ-

mental awareness and action. With the onset of Covid, however, the challenge would

be how to implement the latter without tourism and the much-needed resources it had

hoped might be engendered.

LIVING WITHOUT TOURISM

“Some compare what’s coming with a category 5 hurricane

” was how two

reporters (Borrego & Morejón, 2020) summed up the economic forecast for Cuba under

Covid. They were writing for the Escambray newspaper of Sancti Spíritus, capital of

the province of the same name adjacent to Villa Clara, not that distant from where

we had been lming, and at the time a Covid hot spot. Assessing the economic costs

that would inevitably be felt worldwide, they put these on the magnitude of the 1929

Great Depression. The IMF was projecting a 3% contraction in the global economy,

with spectacular drops in developed nations such as France, Germany, Italy, the U.K.,

and the U.S. What chance for an underdeveloped country like Cuba, they asked.

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 17

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) had just

issued a prognosis of the economic and social impact on the region in the order of a

5.3% drop in GDP, for Cuba 3.7%. These proved to be very conservative estimates:

two months later, ECLAC was predicting an 8% drop in Cuba’s GDP, and by the end

of the year the ofcial Cuban government gure was 11%.

The Escambray reporters interviewed Oscar Luis Hung Pentón, president

of the National Association of Economists, about the economic fallout and options

facing Cuba as a result of the pandemic and put to him a specic question about the

outlook for Cuba’s international tourism. In a vein reminiscent of earlier advocates

for health tourism (Spiegel, J.M., González, M., Cabrera, G.J., Catasús, S., Vidal,

C. & Yassi, A., 2007), he replied: “Now is the opportunity for an alliance between

tourism and health. Cuba needs to develop health tourism more strategically, with

linkages to agriculture and industry. I believe tourism can retool to become a model

based on nature and health.” He also added: “This is no time for grand hotels with

communal pools, restaurants with buffet service, or tourism crowding our towns and

cities.” His words would prove prescient.

At the time, Cuba appeared to have Covid under control, with one of the lowest

case and death rates, achieved through a community-based track-and-trace strategy

and rigorously imposed quarantine, the use of drugs developed by its biotechnology,

and the closure of its borders to all but humanitarian and commercial basic needs.

In June (which for Cuba is the start of the hurricane season), the United Nations

Food and Agricultural Organisation - which had released emergency funds to assist

agriculture and sheries in the wake of Hurricane Irma - provided aid for vulnerable

municipalities to assist the domestic agricultural sector to boost sustainable food

systems resilient to weather events.

In July, when everything indicated that, with scant resources, Cuba had controlled

the pandemic, reporting few cases and a cumulative total of only 87 deaths, a dual-track

strategy was announced of allowing national tourism on the mainland while restricting

international tourism to the natural environment of the offshore keys, with stringent

health requirements and monitoring. A raft of economic reforms was also announced,

many of them agreed a decade earlier but not implemented. The government went to

great lengths in the Cuban media to explain its liquidity crisis and the dramatically wors-

ening economic situation, with fewer oil shipments from Venezuela, fewer overseas

medical exchange programs, fewer remittances from abroad, the underperformance of

domestic agriculture, and tourism brought to a halt. According to several sources, some

95% of new investment had gone into tourism, contrasting with only 5% in domestic

agriculture, thereby exacerbating dependence on imported food and other goods, when

Cuba had no solvency or credit. For the Cuban people, this translated into even greater

shortages of basic foods and other products, including some basic medicines.

Minister of the Economy Alejandro Gil drew attention to the four months without

tourism that translated into a sustained loss of income, having had to stop exporting

some products and in others having faced a drop in international market demand, and

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having had additional costs in the health sector to nance isolation centers and the like.

His summing up was that an economy with zero tourism and a tightened U.S. blockade

could not continue as previously planned. The new strategy incorporated seven stra-

tegic principles: centralized planning, increased domestic production and import

substitution, indirect market regulation, complementary state and non-state sectors,

internal demand playing a multiplier role, greater business autonomy, and an envi-

ronmental policy in harmony with social order and sustainable development. Covid,

combined with the actions of the U.S. government, had in effect eroded the possibility

of foreign-investment-led growth, shifting the focus - nally in the eyes of many econ-

omists - onto how to reorient the growth model by reanimating the domestic economy.

Amidst the increasingly serious situation, and especially worryingly for envi-

ronmentalists, the effort to boost domestic food supplies extended to approval in July

for controlled genetically modied (GM) farming. The Centre for Genetic Engineering

and Biotechnology (CIGB) had since the late 1980s planned research in several trans-

genic crops (sugarcane, potato, papaya, maize, sweet potato, rice, tomato, banana,

coffee, pineapple, and citrus). In 2008, CIGB oversaw the rst open-eld tests of GM

maize, and cultivation was expanded in 2009 in an attempt to mitigate the effects of

food security caused by the succession of a tropical storm (Fay) and two hurricanes

(Gustav and Ike) that hit the island hard the previous year. Little more appears to have

been reported on this until the July 2020 announcement of the new Decree Law and

National Commission for the Use of Genetically Modied Organisms (GMOs) to

oversee regulation and risk management, which would be chaired by CITMA.

Leading Cuban economist Triana (2020) drew attention to the volume edited

by Funes Monzote and Freyre Roach (2009), highlighting the risks of GM agricul-

ture, and Triana himself was skeptical regarding the declaration in its defense by

CITMA Deputy Minister Armando Rodríguez Batista:

The essential thing is to incorporate the orderly and controlled use of geneti-

cally modied organisms in agricultural development programs as an alterna-

tive to develop productivity, consistent with sustainable agriculture and food

sovereignty, based on local research… Cuba seeks to use this and not practices

that in other contexts have had an environmental impact. Cuba can take advan-

tage of the production and technological capacity it has, but doing so with an

environmentally sustainable approach (quoted by Triana).

Achieving synergy between GMOs in agriculture and agricultural and

environmental sustainability is indeed a very high goal, but how can their use be

compatible with food sovereignty, environmental sustainability, nutritional quality,

and local food production systems, Triana asked. He highlighted the amount of

land idle or poorly cultivated and the possibility of raising yields by ‘traditional

methods’, producing cassava, for example.

As the situation continued to worsen, the European Union (EU), within the

framework of the Cuba-EU renewed political dialogue of 2016, in November agreed

to provide 1.5 million Euros to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. The following

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 19

month, the government announced the January 2021 implementation of the long-an-

ticipated monetary reform: phasing out the Cuban convertible peso and leaving in

circulation the U.S. dollar (with other foreign currencies pegged to it) along with the

Cuban peso, which in effect became a devalued domestic currency. Prices of basic

foodstuffs and other necessities (when and where available) were to double, triple

and quadruple, beyond the means of many. Mitigation measures taken earlier by way

of salary increases in the state sector fell short, those in what had until the pandemic

been a growing private sector lost out, and many others found themselves outside

any net. Covid and exacerbated nancial and economic problems provided a window

for what might have been otherwise politically unpalatable economic reforms, which

further accentuated previously growing inequalities.

A sign of how serious the situation had become was when, in December, the

government risked opening up completely to international travel, allowing visitor

home stays as well, in the hopes of kick-starting a growth of 7% in 2021. The gure

was much criticized as unrealistic, presaged as it was on a prioritized reopening of

tourism. The reopening went ahead, with Covid controls in place, but in the home-

stay sector these were said to have often been outed, and, amidst inevitably long

queues for essentials, Cuba found itself battling a Covid resurgence on a scale not

seen during 2020, especially in Havana but also across the island. Daily new cases

by mid-June were nearing 1,500 a day and the cumulative gure for deaths was over

1300. The race was on to complete trials for ve Cuban vaccines to roll out a mass

immunization program over the coming summer months, a program in jeopardy

unless away could also be found to remedy a shortfall in syringes.

The anticipated income from Covid-safe international tourism on the keys

turned out to be illusory, depending as it did on the evolving situation in sender coun-

tries - primarily Canada and Europe, where lockdowns and travel restrictions were

in place. In 2020, Cuba’s international tourism was down to just over a million, the

level it was in 1996, way below the peak of 4.7 million in 2017 and the anticipated

4.5 million before the pandemic. In the rst two months of 2021, it dropped 95.5%

in comparison with the same two (pre-pandemic) months in 2020. The Spanish hotel

chain Meliá reported an 84% loss of income in 2020, with 60% of its 35 hotels on the

island closed due to the pandemic, and in March closed two on the north coast Cayo

Guillermo and one on the south coast Cayo Largo.

Meliá on Santa María key in the Caibarién corridor was spared, though without

any signicant tourist take-up, nor would there be any signicant improvement for

Caibarién, when it was not among those to benet in a March 2021 United Nations

Green Climate Fund million-dollar aid package to CITMA. Designated to strengthen

the coastal resilience of ecosystems to climate change - restoring mangrove, swamp and

marine vegetation, coral reefs, and container walls to protect against sea level rise - this

was to go to 24 municipalities and seven coastal settlements in the provinces of Pinar

del Río, Artemisa, Mayabeque, Ciego de Avila, Camagüey, Las Tunas and Granma.

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As reported back in August 2020, in an article published in Vanguardia, the

local Santa Clara newspaper, and subsequently front-page news in the national Granma

(Pérez Cabrera, 2020), the action plan for the Caibarién corridor approved earlier in

the year had been accorded priority implementation. Mention was made of the Coastal

Resilience project funded in 2017 by the EU and United Nations Development

Programme. The article ended, however, on a cautionary note: that this would “depend

on how the plan is taken up by the authorities, how people are involved, and of course

the objective conditions of the country.” The conditions had been far from conducive.

DOCUMENTARY AS A TOOL FOR RAISING AWARENESS

In March 2019, when the research was underway for the documentary, Cuban

President Miguel Díaz Canel gave a speech to those gathered at the Caribbean Envi-

ronmental Summit in Managua, Nicaragua, in which he declared:

Every one of us understands what we are talking about. The intensity and persis-

tence of natural diverse phenomena in the Greater Caribbean constantly punishes

us with the adverse effects of climate change, in particular the Small Island Deve-

loping States. Living between hurricanes has conditioned our lives. It has modied

our geographies and spurred our migrations. And it has also educated us in the need

to further study the phenomena that afict us and work to reverse their damage.

Very much in the spirit of the planned documentary, his words provided a perfect

title, and footage was included of him giving the speech, in the preamble to which he

read the oft-quoted poem El Caribe by the late National Poet of Cuba, Nicolás Guillén:

“In the aquarium of the Great Zoo/swims the Caribbean./This seagoing and enigmatic

animal/has a crystal crescent,/a blue back, a green tail,/a belly of dense coral,/grey ns

of cyclone speed./In the aquarium, this inscription:/Beware: it bites.” (Guillén, 2002).

True to warning, it wasn’t all plain sailing. Two changes were afoot in Cuba

that impacted on lming in June and July 2019. The rst was a new decree law

recognizing independent lmmaking, though ICAIC still needed to approve lming

permission. The second was to grant greater autonomy and decision-making

powers to municipalities, away from the provincial and national government. As

an independent lmmaking venture, the necessary lming permission was secured

from ICAIC. However, this did not lter down to the municipality of Caibarién.

The ins and outs of why this happened were never made clear, but local political

sensitivities swung into play, forcing a stop to lming there. Fortuitously, lming

later in Las Terrazas and Santa Marta would more than compensate.

By October 2019, when the rst cut was ready for a participants’ viewing,

Cuba was under pressure. Fresh U.S. sanctions on oil shipments from Venezuela had

plunged Cuba into a fuel crisis. There wasn’t enough petrol in the pumps. People

were instructed to stay home if they lived too far to walk to work. There was huge

pressure on public transport. Priority was given to hospitals and food distribution.

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 21

Nobody could say for sure whether any cinema projection facilities would be up and

running, nor was it clear that anyone would be able to make it to a screening, or one

could even take place, and much less so in Caibarién. In the event, a screening was

held at the Film Institute’s Chaplin Cinema, in sweltering heat since there was no air

conditioning, for a small intrepid gathering, and a car was secured to reach Remedios

and overnight for an intimate second screening there.

In December 2019, the nished documentary was launched in Havana during

the 44

International Film Festival, with opening words by FANJ President Núñez

Vélis and the British Ambassador to Cuba, Anthony Stokes, who had been involved

in overseeing British aid for recovery in Caibarién after Hurricane Irma. Camagüey-

based Cuban lm critic Juan Antonio García Borrero and Spanish academic Maria

Luisa Ortega, visiting for the Festival, led a post-screening Q&A. They each reected

on how the documentary had made them think about issues in their own lives, García

Borrero in terms of other small Cuban towns past and present, and Ortega on the

vulnerability of tourism-dependent areas in Spain such as the Canary Islands.

Audience discussion revolved around the challenge of getting the documen-

tary ‘out there’, on television and social media, and in communities.

In January 2020, a dedicated website was set up (livingbetweenhurricanes.org),

with the nished documentary available as an open-access digital resource, to be

viewed as a single full-length documentary (70m) or in three separate parts for use in

teaching and for reaching wider audiences, with English and Spanish versions (and

one to come in French). Supporting materials regularly added to the website include

a companion book (Curry-Machado, 2021).

The pandemic put paid to plans for in-person dissemination across communi-

ties and institutions in Cuba and limited national internet access meant neither was it

feasible to schedule online screenings there either. Only one in-person screening took

place in the U.K., before having to move to online screenings followed by Q&A. To

date, these have been hosted in ‘the U.K., Europe, U.S. and Canada, as well as at inter-

national conferences, such as one in Guyana, with more to come.

In a personal communication, Spanish academic Concha Mateo described the

documentary as a very timely and enjoyable “epic poem… with a critical view and

with threads of nostalgia, but with serenity, with an open attitude towards the possi-

bilities for rescuing the connection with the earth, carrying a chronological historical

sequence towards an open perspective.” Living Between Hurricanes, she declared,

“can mean many things. Cuba has always lived between hurricanes, of different

kinds. One can have quite varied debates after watching the lm.”

This has proved to be the case. In summer 2020, the focus was on the phased

post-Covid re-opening, economic reforms, and debates among Cuban economists,

social scientists, and environmentalists regarding the linkages between Covid, the

economy, society, and the environment - as when GM farming was approved - and

how post-pandemic Cuba, and the world, might move forward to a more sustainable

future. This continued through 2020 and into 2021, with Cuba’s opening up to all

Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica22

tourism, more economic reforms, and more debates, and Covid escalating amidst

palpable shortages, inated prices, and long lines for food and other essentials.

The local and the national were circumscribed by the global, not least the

dramatic U.S. election of late 2020. While it is hoped that the Biden administration

may provide breathing space by lifting some of the most onerous limitations placed

on Cuba by the Trump administration, none anticipate a lifting of the U.S. embargo

overnight. Amidst signs of rising discontent, how Cuba and Cubans respond to the

current crisis is yet to be seen, but they undoubtedly again face an uncertain future.

Thompson & Gaviria, in a 2004 report for Oxfam America, were among many

who celebrated how Cuba, with its limited economic circumstances, had demonstrated

with its disaster preparedness that political commitment to saving lives is the basis from

which so much else follows. Cuba’s impressive work at the national level has created

measures, structures, and assets that are fundamentally necessary in the long run.

However, Cuba’s increasing reliance on far more intangible assets such as local leader-

ship, community mobilization, popular participation in planning, and social capital is

what will be sorely needed to underpin the nation’s severely dwindled tangible assets.

CONCLUSION

The coming years will, undoubtedly, be tough for the global economy and

society, and international tourism, and yet there are those in Cuba who argue this is

an opportunity not to be missed for a serious rethink. Torres (2020a, 2020b) reected

on how Cuba’s economic growth had halved between 2016 and 2019, compared to

2010-2015. He elaborated on how factors such as the economic crisis in Venezuela,

the cancelation of contracts for the provision of medical services, the end of the boom

in international tourism, the effect of new U.S. sanctions, and the contradictions of the

economic reform intervened in this. Signicantly, he referred to how the weighting of

one or another factor was the subject of wide debate in the country. For the average

citizen, however, the clearest symptom of economic problems was the growing shortage

of products of all kinds, including basic necessities such as food, medicine, and fuel.

While not equating the situation with the 1990s Special Period, the economic

contraction and social stratication had accentuated, with a forecast of up to a fth

of Cuban households nding it hard to meet their basic needs. His verdict was that

“any strategy based on export-led growth will be an uphill battle… Overdepen-

dence on one activity has proved disastrous too many times… It’s not so much the

external context… but rather the inconsistency of domestic policy… We are the

ones pitted against each other” (Torres, 2020b).

The signs point in different directions.Social networks, which have become a

mirror of the national reality, exude both optimism and hopelessness. Between 2010

and 2019, over a million left work in the state sector. Of these a little over 600,000

were reported as going into the private sector, leaving well over 400,000 excluded

Jean Stubbs • Cuba Between Hurricanes:Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Challenges 23

from either, and by February 2021 over 250,000 (45.5% of those formally registered

in the private sector) had terminated their licenses. While aspiring to social justice and

yet recognizing current social injustice, what are the possible economic solutions? The

Cuban government is not responsible for the pandemic, but everything that it stopped

doing or was only half done impacted on a complex scenario.Can such exceptional

circumstances serve to forge a necessary consensus for change and what should that

change look like? These wrote Torres, are the questions people are asking.

Hernández (2021) similarly encapsulated the complexities of the situation:

“Understanding the transition in which Cuba nds itself today, the political process that

characterizes it during this moment, the ongoing debate about current policies and their

scope, and the path that will open as of April is anything but obvious.” He made the

important point, however, that there has been an inevitable re-evaluation of health, higher

education, culture, and science, hitherto dened as “public services” and “budgeted

sectors”, understood, that is, as “unproductive”. The challenges of the pandemic, he

wrote, “have forced us to look more towards innovation and development in the produc-

tion of high-end medicines and medical services, in contrast to sectors such as tourism,

where more conventional representations prevail and with poor added value.”

Will such lessons be learned going forward from the perfect storm of a

pandemic he, too, asked.

Fernández Soriano (2020) had earlier questioned the global paradigm of unlim-

ited growth and the consumer culture, on a limited planet with increasingly scarce

resources and all existence interconnected in the biosphere. Covid served as a warning,

he declared, of the dangerous transmission of the virus to humans due to contact or

consumption of wild species, shifting natural borders, and loss of biodiversity:

The global pandemic alerts us to the profound environmental changes caused

by human action and its techno-industrial culture developed on the basis of

fossil energy… After this pandemic, there will be no ‘new normal’, it will

have to be another world that is built… with greater solidarity and cons-

cious citizen participation, or it will be through more and more authorita-

rian mechanisms of power... Current and future generations will be forced to

rethink their lifestyles or live in a dystopian world.

Cuba, he argued, presents a different if contradictory panorama: a poor country,

blocked for 60 years by the world’s greatest power, with a declining economy and

a large debt, without external nancing and with a high illiquidity index, a ‘country

risk’, and supply crisis threatening to turn into a food crisis as acute as the one

in the early 1990s. And yet, Cuba has potential from an environmental point of

view. Energy dependence is an Achilles heel for its economy and an accelerated

increase in clean energies is needed. Financing dedicated to tourism expansion needs

to be redirected to reactivating agriculture, when Cuba has a room capacity already

far above pre-Covid market demand, averaging no more than 30% occupancy year-

long in several tourism poles. To what end, he asked, the tourism development plans

for the huge Punta Colorada megaproject in Pinar del Río, costing billions of dollars,

Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia, 22(2): 1-29. Julio-diciembre, 2021. ISSN: 1409-469X · San José, Costa Rica24

which will undoubtedly impact on the marine-coastal ecosystems of the northwest

of the province and the Guanahacabibes and Viñales Biosphere Reserve. What Cuba

needs urgently is to consolidate what works well, transform what is inefcient, and

create an ecosocialist alternative shaped by citizen participation.

His words nd an echo in the documentary: breaking with the false concept

of treating nature as a commodity to do with as we please (Iturralde), nding solu-

tions that are not in confrontation with nature (Núñez Velis), working for change

from within our own communities and with our difculties and our problems (Funes

Monzote), and building greater individual awareness and action (Morf). Cuba, like

the rest of the world, is clearly at a crossroads. Current global strictures might sadly

invoke a future that is less rather than more in harmony with nature, and less commu-

nitarian than authoritarian. In the struggle to make the former a reality, hopefully

Cuba and the documentary can play a demonstrable part.

NOTES

1 The project was made possible with funding for research networking from the U.K. Arts and

Humanities Research Council.

2 Interviewee quotes included in this section are taken from the English-language translation for

the documentary, and interviewees are rst identied by their name and surname, along with

dates for referenced publications if these have not been cited previously.

3 Author’s translation into English for this quote and others that follow, when taken from Spanish-

language publications.

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