Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D. Friday, Nov. 8, 2002.
NewsMax.com.
Part I - The Hunter and the Hunted
in the Lost Caribbean Paradise
As we pointed out in Part I of this article, in Cuba all natural resources
are at the disposal of the Revolution i.e., Fidel Castro and his ruling
elites. Cuban ecologists who speak out are quickly silenced, and so national
treasures like the tropical forests of the Ciénaga de Zapata, the
marshland areas adjacent to the Bay of Pigs, are being destroyed, and with them,
their exotic flora and fauna. Campesinos spent more time capturing young parrots
(Amazona leucocephala) to sell to the Russians before they left and collecting
mollusks for foreign collections than working in the unproductive farm
cooperatives.
In "Natumaleza Cubana," Carlos Wotzkow estimates from his own
studies in the region that 50 percent of the Ciénaga de Zapata ecosystem
has already been destroyed and lost in wanton environmental degradation and
ecologic destruction. (1)
Likewise, the "Plan Turquino," the much-touted government plan
that employed young soldiers in agriculture and the tending of cattle has been
an utter disaster. These "production zones" have brought desolation to
a once productive land. Cattle have destroyed rice fields and other crops, and
although the government boasts about the number of cattle in the country, the
Cuban people wonder where the meat, milk and other dairy products have gone.
As in George Orwell's "1984," the people listen unquestioningly to
the announced production figures, but no one believes them. In fact, only
children younger than age 7 and the elderly are allowed to buy milk with their
ration cards, and meat rations remain meager.
In 1995, one of Wotzkow's colleagues visiting a farm wondered why the cows
and even the bulls were missing tails. Was this a congenital disease? No
the campesinos (peasants) were going out at night and slicing the tails off the
animals to feed their families. Out of necessity a new dish had appeared "flaming
tails."
Many examples can be cited of the ongoing environmental destruction
throughout the island. Another devastated area is the La Laguna de Ariguanabo, a
once beautiful lagoon that from time immemorial served as a natural habitat for
migratory birds as well as predatory hawks, the Falco peregrinus. The lagoon has
been drained and the nearby primal Ceíba forests, the Ceíba de la
Cangrejera (Ceiba pentandrata), cut down and erased out of the geographic
annals, turned into a bullfrog (Rana catesbiana) breeding farm for consumption
in the tourist industry (i.e., the ancas de rana dish).
Wotzkow does not neglect to discuss what he terms "the militarization
of the sciences" and the development of the Frente Biologico for potential
biological war against the United States with the use of migratory birds.
We have discussed the issue of the Cuban potential for bioterrorism and its
bioweapons program. (2-5) Suffice to say that, unaware of the Frente Biologico's
agenda and accepting Castro's "peaceful, scientific" intentions, many
American institutions have given logistic, scientific and financial support to
the Cuban regime for the study of bird migration. Wotzkow mentions specifically
the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Pennsylvania and several private
individuals.
Incredibly, even the U.S. government provided Cuba with materials in the
1980s that could potentially be used in its biological warfare program. This is
substantiated by the research of Professor Manuel Cereijo of Florida
International University, who found that the CDC provided Cuban scientists with
the St. Louis encephalitis virus, a dangerous arbovirus in the same family as
the West Nile virus but which carries a much higher mortality (up to 20
percent). In a series of recent articles, NewsMax.com has reported, and the CDC
has confirmed, that many dangerous viral and bacterial specimens were shipped to
a variety of nations, including Iraq and Cuba.
Most perplexing and reflective of the dire circumstances existing in Cuba
today, relating to both environmental and economic deterioration, is the unknown
grisly story of Havana's National Zoological Park. The park has been run under
the direction of the local chieftain ("Cacique") Abelardo Moreno
Bonilla, who was known as "the tiger" because he would steal the meat
allocated to the felines! The meat would be consumed by the chieftain's family
and friends. Eventually, the tigers themselves were sacrificed, and the meat
sold to tourists for $8.00 a steak!
Revelations reveal more ghastly nightly occurrences at the zoo, stories that
could serve as the plot for B-rated horror movies. The partially devoured bodies
of Havana students have been found in the park, consumed by the hungry felines.
It turned out the students were hunting the tigers and leopards for food, but,
unfortunately, sometimes the tables were turned in the battle for survival, and
the students became the hunted instead of the hunters. On one night, a man's
body was discovered. He had apparently been kicked to death by the African
ostrich he had been pursuing for food!
The hunting of man or beast brings me one way or the other to another item
that I wanted to discuss from Wotzkow's magnum opus, "Natumaleza Cubana."
(Unfortunately, I cannot cover every important environmental issue discussed in
this book.)
While ordinary Cubans have been disarmed because the Maximum Leader doesn't
trust his civilian population with firearms, those who are more equal than
others living in this Orwellian Caribbean farm can fish and hunt everything that
swims, crawls or flies in the hapless island. I am not deriding the poor Cuban
campesino who uses an air gun, antiquated single-shot escopeta ("shotgun"),
22-caliber rifle or any other illicit firearm that he may be able to get his
hands on, to hunt in order to feed his family in the Parque de Cristal in the
old Oriente province or in the historic Sierra del Escambray in Las Villas, near
my native city of Sancti Spiritus.
They have to survive, even if they have to risk imprisonment or their lives
for hunting on forbidden land. Some have been shot for hunting cattle in the
latifundia, run by the biggest landowner in Cuba, the eldest Castro brother, Ramón,
or for hunting the transplanted white-tailed deer belonging to the mayimbe
hunting reserve under the administration of the chieftain, Comandante Guillermo
García Frías. This injustice reveals that Fidel Castro and his
minions are more akin to King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham than to Robin
Hood and his band of illicit hunters in Sherwood Forest.
Hunting by members of the privileged mayimbe class and the upper echelon of
Cuba's military society is a large and lucrative sport, which is sometimes
extended to VIP tourists with hard cash. Thousands of birds are shot each year
by the Cuban nomenklatura and their guests. Prime targets are the doves (Zenaida
sp.) and ducks that stop during their migration in the marshes of El Jíbaro
near Sancti Spiritus, the same area my father and I traversed during our 1966
escape from Cuba. (6)
But, because hunting by the privileged parties is unregulated and exploited
to the hilt without attention to the environment and natural habitats, many
native Cuban species of birds are nearing extinction, including the lechuza, the
Cuban owl (Tyto alba); the various hawks and birds of prey, buhos, gavilanes
(Buteo platypterus) and cernícolos (Falco sparverius), and even the Cuban
parrots, the cotorras (Amazona leucocephala).
With the lack of foliage and destruction of habitats, the birds having
nowhere to hide, and the mayimbe hunter has reason to smile as he thinks of the
Revolutionary hunters' slogan: "Birds that escape in the night will fall in
the morning."
Birds and other fauna that aren't shot or trapped, or their young captured
in their nests, are sold and exported by State-run agencies for hard cash, the
ill-conceived policy justified by the Cuban bureaucrats (of course with the
consent of the Maximum Leader).
The fauna of Cuba's once wondrous system of caves have not been spared. In
Pinar del Rio, Matanzas and Oriente provinces, the extensive system of caverns
and its interesting and diverse fauna, including bats and fish, has been
destroyed by the military. The caves have been used extensively, without
consideration for the fragile interrelated ecological systems, to store tanks,
cannons, trucks and other heavy ordnance, so that only the usual hardy survivors
remain: cockroaches (Periplaneta Americana), rats (Rattus sp. ) and mice (Mus
musculus).
In short and suffice to say, as Wotzkow reveals in "Natumaleza Cubana,"
the triumph of the Revolution in 1959 has brought nothing but environmental
degradation, deforestation, pollution, the loss of flora and fauna, and habitat
destruction, without any economic benefit to the nation and the hapless Cuban
people. Through four decades of destruction, the environmental community and the
international press have remained silent. The long silence remains deafening.
And yet the devastation of a once beautiful and prosperous island has brought
the Caribbean nation to the edge of an environmental and ecological apocalypse!
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., is Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Sentinel (www.haciendapub.com) and author of "Vandals
at the Gates of Medicine" (1995); "Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate
Socialized Medicine" (1997); and for the lesson of gun control in Cuba, see
his latest book, "Cuba in Revolution: Escape From a Lost Paradise"
(2002). All three books are available from www.haciendapub.com.
References
1. Wotzkow C.
Natumaleza
Cubana. Ediciones Universales, P.O. Box 450353, Miami, FL 33245-0353, 1998.
2. Betancourt E. West Nile virus Is Castro's
bioterrorism threat being ignored? Medical Sentinel 2001;6(4):121-122; and
Blazquez, Agustin. Cuba, Castro and bioterrorism. Medical Sentinel
2001;6(4):118-120.
3. Faria, Cuba in Revolution, op. cit., Appendix K, pp.
380-387 and Appendix L, pp. 388-392.
4. Faria MA Jr. Iraq and Cuba fitting pieces in the
West Nile virus puzzle. NewsMax.com, August 9, 2002.
5. Wotzkow C, Sutton J. West Nile virus: an inside view.
NewsMax.com, September 9, 2002.
6. Faria MA Jr. Cuba in Revolution Escape From a
Lost Paradise. Macon, GA, Hacienda Publishing, Inc., 2002, pp. 88-116.
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