HavanaScientists warn 52 vertebrate species face critical extinction risk in Cuba.
Biologist Isbel Díaz Torres says real conservation requires active science and infrastructure the economic crisis has eliminated.
A mass exodus of young scientists has left no succession for field monitoring, she said.
Sources: Global Voices
THE ENDEMISM PROBLEM
Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean and the most biologically distinctive — roughly half of its plant species and a third of its vertebrates exist nowhere else. Island endemism means extinction on Cuba is global extinction; there is no second population to fall back on.
WHY ISLANDS LOSE SPECIES FIRST
Island species evolve without large predators or competitors, so they specialize narrowly and reproduce slowly. When pressure arrives — invasive rats, habitat loss, a hurricane — they cannot adapt fast enough. Of all recorded vertebrate extinctions since 1500, roughly 75% occurred on islands, though islands hold only about 5% of land area.
THE SPECIAL PERIOD LEGACY
When Soviet subsidies collapsed in 1991, Cuba lost 80% of its trade overnight. Fertilizer, pesticides, and fuel disappeared — agriculture went organic by necessity, and paradoxically, biodiversity briefly recovered as industrial inputs vanished. The current crisis is different: scientists are leaving the country itself.
THE EXODUS
Between 2022 and 2024 roughly a million Cubans left the island — close to 10% of the population, the largest emigration wave in the country's history. Young professionals with university training are overrepresented; a biologist earning the equivalent of $20 a month has every incentive to leave.
WHY FIELD MONITORING DIES FIRST
Conservation science is unusually fragile. It requires continuous time series — the same transects walked, the same nests counted, year after year — to detect population trends against natural variation. Break the chain for five years and the data before and after are no longer comparable. You are not pausing the science; you are losing it.
THE GUANAHACABIBES MODEL
Cuba pioneered low-input conservation: Guanahacabibes National Park on the western tip, the Zapata Swamp's Ramsar wetlands, and the Alejandro de Humboldt park in the east together protect a quarter of the island. The protected areas still exist on paper. What has eroded is the staff who walk them.