The U.S. embargo comes in the way of protecting Cuba's rich ecological resources. The island's mountains, forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals, some seen nowhere else. Once the embargo ends, it could face a flood of investors from the U.S. and elsewhere, eager to exploit them. THROUGH accidents of geography and history, Cuba is a priceless ecological resource. That is why many scientists are so worried about what will become of it after Fidel Castro and his associates leave power and the American government relaxes or ends its trade embargo. Cuba, by far the region's largest island, sits at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Its mountains, forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals, some seen nowhere else. And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its major economic patron, Cuba's economy has stagnated. Cuba has not been free of development, including Soviet-style top-down agricultural and mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in the region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution in 1959, when development has been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors from the United States and elsewhere, eager to exploit those landscapes. V Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and elsewhere, met in November last year in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss the island's resources and how to continue to protect them. Cuba has done "what we should have done - identify your hot spots of biodiversity and set them aside," said Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans who attended the conference. In the late 1990s, Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, to advise Cuban officials writing new environmental laws. But, he said in an interview, "an invasion of U.S. consumerism, a U.S.-dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer" when the embargo ends. By some estimates, tourism in Cuba is increasing 10 per cent annually. At a minimum, as Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing effort, said in an interview at the conference, "we can guess that tourism is going to increase in a very fast way" when the embargo ends. "It is estimated we could double tourism in one year," said Rey, who heads environmental efforts at Cuba's Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment. About 1,125 kilometres long and about 160 km wide at its widest, Cuba runs from Haiti west almost to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. It offers crucial habitat for birds. Zapata Swamp, on the island's southern coast, may be notorious for its mosquitoes, but it is also known for its fish, amphibians, birds and other creatures. Among them is the Cuban crocodile, which has retreated to Cuba from a range that once ran from the Cayman Islands to the Bahamas. Cuba has the most biologically diverse populations of freshwater fish in the region. Its relatively large underwater coastal shelves are crucial for numerous marine species, said Ken Lindeman, a marine biologist at the Florida Institute of Technology. Like corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. But they have largely escaped damage from pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing practices. In a report last year, the World Wide Fund for Nature said that "in dramatic contrast" to its island neighbours, Cuba's beaches, mangroves, reefs, seagrass beds and other habitats were relatively well preserved. Their biggest threat, the report said, was "the prospect of sudden and massive growth in mass tourism when the U.S. embargo lifts". To prepare for that day, researchers from a number of American institutions and organisations are working on ecological conservation in Cuba. What they are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance, turtle migration and land use patterns. Cuban scientists at the conference noted that this work continued a tradition of collaboration that dates from the mid-19th century, when Cuban researchers began working with naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In the 20th century, naturalists from Harvard and the University of Havana worked together for decades. But now, they said, collaborative relationships are full of problems. The Cancun meeting itself illustrated one. "We would have liked to be able to do this in Havana or in the United States," Jorge Luis Fernandez Chamero, the director of the Cuban science and environment agency and leader of the Cuban delegation, said through a translator at the opening of the meeting. "This we cannot do." While the U.S. government grants licences to some (but not all) American scientists seeking to travel to Cuba, it routinely rejects Cuban researchers seeking permission to come to the U.S., researchers from both countries said. So the meeting organisers turned to Alberto Mariano Vazquez De la Cer-da, a retired Admiral in the Mexican navy, an oceanographer with a doctorate from Texas A & M University and a member of the advisory board of the Harte Research Institute (a recently endowed research institute of the university), who supervised arrangements for the Cuban conferees. John Thorbjarnarson, a zoologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that he had difficulty obtaining permission from Cuba to visit some areas in that country, like a habitat area for the Cuban crocodile near the Bay of Pigs. "I have to walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do and what the Cubans allow me to do," said Thorbjarnarson, who did not attend the conference. "It is not easy to walk that line." American scientists, foundations and other groups are ready to help with equipment % and supplies but are ham-pered by the embargo. For in- ^jt stance, Maria Elena Ibarra Martin, a marine scientist at the University of Havana, said that American organisations had provid-ed Cuban turtle and shark researchers with tags and other equipment. They shipped it via Canada. Another thorny issue is ships. "If you are going to do marine science, at some point you have to go out on a ship," said Robert E. Hueter, who directs the Centre for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, and attended the Can-cun meeting. But, he and others said, the U.S. government will not allow ships into American ports if they have recently been in Cuban waters in the previous six months, and the Cuban government will not allow American research vessels in Cuban waters. One answer might be vessels that are already in Cuba, but nowadays they are often tied up in tourism-related efforts, Cubans at the Canciin meeting said. Another big problem in Cuba is the lack of access to a source of information researchers almost everywhere else take for granted: the Internet. Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access to the Internet as a form of censorship. The Cuban government blames the embargo, which it says has left the country with inadequate bandwidth and other technical problems that require it to limit Internet access to people who need it most. For David Guggenheim, an organiser of the conference and an ecol-ogist, the best lessons for Cubans to ponder as they contemplate a more prosperous future can be seen 145 km north, in the Florida Keys (an archipelago of islands in southeast America). There, he said, too many people have poured into an ecosystem too fragile to support them. - "As Cuba becomes an increasingly popular tourist resort," Guggenheim said, "we don't want to see and they don't want to see the same mistakes, where you literally love something to death." But there are people sceptical that Cuba will resist this kind of pressure. One of them is Houck. The environmental laws he worked on are "a very strong structure," he said. "But all laws do is give you the opportunity to slow down the wrong thing. Over time, you can wear the law down." That is particularly true in Cuba, he said, "where there's no armed citizenry out there with high-powered science groups pushing in the opposite direction. What they lack is the counter-pressure of environmental groups and environmental activists." ?