Writing and photography by David Helvarg

I was scheduled to visit a coral restoration project off Guanahcabibes National Park,  a world-class biosphere reserve in western Cuba.  Then I found out the only small dive resort in the area that I’d made a reservation for online was on the Trump administration’s list of hundreds of prohibited hotels, dive centers, marinas, tour agencies, stores, companies and ministries, so I made other plans.   

The administration claims its travel restrictions are targeting the communist government, not the people of Cuba.   But with tourism being the largest sector of the Cuban economy (followed by remittances from Cubans working overseas) the steep drop in U.S. visitors is being felt by everyone. 

 “Things are much worse than two years ago when Americans started coming here in real numbers under President Obama,” the head of a major Cuban travel agency told me.

I ended up diving out of Playa Larga on the south coast of Cuba by the Bay of Pigs, famous as the place where Cubans under Fidel Castro rolled back a CIA sponsored exile invasion in 1961, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis that almost led to nuclear Armageddon a year later. 

I took a picture of a Russian tank mounted on a pedestal at the entry to town with a horse cart passing by.  Only two percent of Cubans own private cars, almost half of them pre-1959 American models from before the revolution.  Once you get outside Havana the majority of traffic switches to motorcycles, trucks, tractors, horse carts, ox-carts and bicycles. Many Cubans gather at roadside kiosks to hitchhike including women and soldiers.

I stayed at The Francy named for Francisco Veulens, the entrepreneurial manager of Playa Larga’s Octopus Dive Center (he drives a green Alpha Romeo).  Like many ‘Casas Particulars’ or private homes that Cubans have converted into bars, restaurants and rooms for rent, the Francy included a cinderblock casita painted pink where I slept near a storm eroded palm shaded white sand beach that draws 20 and 30-something backpackers from everywhere but the United States.  This was no real surprise except for the night I went to relieve my bladder and found a frog in my toilet bowl. 

Cuba also has all-inclusive beach resorts including Varadero, Cayo Coco (where a causeway designed by Fidel Castro blocked the tidal flow and degraded the estuary) and the south coast island of Cayo Largo with its own international airport. U.S. citizens aren’t allowed to visit these because the Treasury Department insists going to the beach “is not educational.”  “People to People” educational travel is the most commonly used of twelve travel categories under which the U.S. government allows its citizens to visit Cuba.

I’d flown in with Manuel Ramos.  Manny left Cuba when he was eight, spent a career as a lawyer and law professor and has now returned home, married a local woman and claims joint U.S. Cuban citizenship.  He calls Cuba his “happy place.”

My first full day he took us to what he said was one of the best snorkeling beaches anywhere just two hours east of Havana.   We stopped for lunch in a converted private home in the rundown beach town of Guanabo which had been a center of prostitution during the 1990s ‘special period’ when the collapse of the Soviet Union and loss of its subsidies led to widespread hunger and desperation on the island. 

A short time later we exited the highway at Puerto Escondido and drove down a rough storm damaged road to a cabin resort where Cubans pay a dollar a day for summer vacations with their families.  Most of the small boxy cinderblock cabins had lost their roofs to Hurricane Irma – that had also flooded downtown Havana – and fallen trees still blocked part of the limestone road where a few workers with machetes were clearing foliage as we pulled over by a crystal clear cove leading out to aquamarine and deeper cobalt blue depths. 

But when I entered the water I was greeted by yet another coral graveyard, similar to what I’ve witnessed in parts of Florida and Australia.  Along with broken branching and fan corals from the storm there was a lot of algae covered rock where the overly hot water of the Florida Straits – that helped supercharge the hurricane season of 2017 – likely contributed to the bleaching death of 90 percent of the cove’s hard corals.  There was some re-growth and small fish where I swam farther out along with blue Man-of-Wars floating on the surface.  Manny had left the water moments after we’d entered.  “I couldn’t stay in there.  I’m so sad,” he told me.  “You should have been here two years ago.  There were so many fish, it was so colorful.”

“I’m 30 and I’m hoping to see as many of the world’s coral reefs as I can in the next three years before they die,” Ramon Vos tells me.  He’s a friendly seal-shaped Dutch diver of Sri Lankan heritage now living in France where he’s secured spare parts for Francis’s dive operations in exchange for two weeks of free diving.  We are riding in a twelve-person blue and white bus full of divers, tanks and gear, a kind of land panga or small boat as our dive sites are all shore based along the Bay of Pigs’ mangrove and jagged limestone lined perimeter.  Francis has a second ancient yellow school bus that he loads with 30-40 novice divers outfitted with his well-worn gear and local guides.  No one is required to show dive certification cards but instead signs a paper saying what level diver they think they are.   My first air tank lacks an O-ring that they quickly replace.  Other than the tanks and weights I’m glad I brought my own well-maintained gear.

The good news is this bay’s reefs are alive with healthy barrel sponges, fans and other soft corals, also pillar, lettuce and brain coral along with stands of elkhorn and staghorn that are listed as an endangered species in the Florida Keys. 

Unfortunately in four days of diving we see almost no large fish other than a few barracuda and Jack.  There are plenty of small yellow and purple chromies and big Cuban crabs and squirrel fish in deep swim through caverns and garden eels waving like prairie grass on a sand flats, also spotted drum and grunts, goatfish, a few hidden lobster, some invasive lion fish, even a couple of juvenile grouper and parrotfish. 

However to keep a reef healthy you need large herbivores including the kind of bulky brightly colored parrotfish more common in nearby Cozumel and parts of the Keys that eat coral and excrete sand grazing away the algae growth that can otherwise smother a reef.  The problem here is overfishing with fish and lobster on every menu in every restaurant targeting the European, Canadian and other tourists still coming to Cuba or else feeding the poor locals. 

The reef looks very different further east in the world famous Jardines de la Reina or Gardens of the Queen, an 837-square-mile no-fishing reserve where only 1,500 divers a year are allowed to immerse themselves in its extensive shark enhanced (not infested) waters that also swarm with other large fish including Goliath Grouper, Hogfish, Tarpon, moray eels, rays, even the occasional Cuban crocodile.   A healthy reef like the Gardens is an upside down pyramid of life with more biomass of large predators than of prey.

The Gardens is also protected from poachers by local residents who keep a sharp eye out for illegal fishing since the high-end dive money headed offshore also flows freely through the area’s small onshore communities.   While you can make your own dive adventure for less than $600 dollars a week a trip to the Gardens can run over  $6,000 dollars with stopovers at five star Havana hotels like the Parque Central and the best Old Town bars.

The establishment of other no-take marine reserves in the Bay of Pigs, Isle of Youth and elsewhere in Cuba could – within a few years – restore otherwise healthy reefs to near pristine diving conditions while boosting local economies.  I’ve witnessed similar transformations take place in depleted areas such as Cabo Pulmo Mexico where local fishing families, having emptied out their home waters, decided to try a radical new approach and set them aside as a reserve.  Within a decade the biomass of marine wildlife had increased over 450 percent.  Its waters now teem wtih great swirling columns of fish, golden groupers, bull sharks, leaping rays and salty tourists.  Those former fishing families are also making more money than they ever did running the local dive operations and resorts.

But with Cuban tourism in decline under President Trump and the Cuban government bureaucracy slow to respond to new opportunities, change is proving difficult though one community-based attempt to establish a new reserve is underway on the Isle of Youth off the south coast, a collaboration between local townspeople, Cuban scientists and the U.S. based science conservation activist David Guggenheim who has worked in Cuba for 18 years. 

Meanwhile we managed to have some fun and even inspiring dives including one involving a wide-stride step off a ten foot cliff later concluded by handing our gear up onto a jagged rock shelf and then getting hauled up like tuna onto the limestone atop a rising wave.  In between we saw some giant green sponges, homesteaded by brittle stars, small reef fish and a coral encrusted shipwreck that houses a school of grunts and pair of large yellow and gray Angelfish.  I imagined it might be an invasion boat sunk in 1961 but it turned out to be an old fishing vessel.    

And then there is the dive I will never forget.  We drive down a dirt path inland from the coastal road and soon find ourselves gearing up in a warm scrub forest next to a thin cut in the earth’s surface that marks a Cenote or sinkhole cavern named El Brinco.

The entry is about six feet wide with a staircase chopped into it and a cement platform with a center pole ladder dropping eight feet into a clear blue pool. 

Francis tells us its over 43 meters (140 feet) deep.  We jump into its narrow watery space and paddle away quickly before those behind us leap.  It’s fresh water over salt where the colder fresh water floats above the salt percolating up through the limestone from the nearby sea.  It’s blurry in this mixing zone making you want to squint to see better.  We go in two groups of four and six, lighting our way with underwater torches.  

Soon we pass through a dark chamber with limestone drippings on its walls and enter a vastly larger chamber that rises like one of the great arching cathedrals of Europe with light filtering down from its highest point where a smaller sinkhole has opened up onto the water below.  We’re diving at sixty feet and thirty feet below can see the blue glow balls of our other divers’ torches and I’m just in awe of how nature’s cathedrals always surpass the pale imitations of man.  It’s a long swim the length of the chamber and I’m also reminded of a Jacques Cousteau quote, “When I dive I feel like an angel.”  I feel as if I’m floating suspended between prayers and heaven. 

We exit into another chamber where my torch lights up some red and brown algae that waves on the ceiling and stalactite like calcium carbonate drippings on the walls that shimmer along their surface like bubbling shrimp.  We’re blocked by a huge boulder until Yankier, our young dive master, directs us into a left turn that leads up a narrower tunnel where we pop up into an air pocket with the ceiling about eight feet over our heads and some light infiltrating from cracks in the walls. 

After some time we return the way we came.  Along the way I look up and see that we’re under a lens of fresh water like a glass table – the actual water table – and above that trees and sky show where the forest floor has split open. 

After 45 minutes we’re back at the ladder where we take off our flippers, toss them to the top and climb the branch like rungs, feeling the weight of gravity (tanks and weights) dragging on us as we return to the surface world.

Before heading back to Havana we visit the Zapata National Park a vast wetland about three quarters the size of the Everglades and full of flamingos, white pelicans wood storks, crocodiles and Italian bird watchers.  Park biologist Yoandy “Kiko” Garray tells me that under a twin parks agreement signed under Obama the head of Zapata was planning to meet the chief ranger of the Everglades National Park in Florida until the Trump administration cancelled his trip.  Despite this scientists in Cuba and the United States are still making every effort to work together to understand how our common waters and reefs link up through currents and chemistry and shared seabird, coral and fish propagation. 

Cuba has the same sand and limestone overlaid by reefs, salt marshes and naturally occurring underwater cave systems, the same natural geology as Florida only with sixty years of unnatural divisions that have severed most of our human bonds.  Today the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Midwestern farmers and others would like to end the U.S. embargo on Cuba that limits business and travel, science, culture and other connections with our former colony, nemesis and neighbor.

President Obama launched an opening to Cuba, its land, water and people.  Now that window is closing and we don’t know for how long. 

David Helvarg is an author, diver and Executive Director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation and policy group.  He also chaired the global March for the Ocean.

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This piece was edited and posted onto SEVENSEAS Media by: Bharamee Thamrongmas.