Originally posted on nytimes.com
By Erica Goode
HAVANA — Like many of his countrymen, Jorge Angulo hopes the United States will lift the decades-old economic embargo against Cuba.
But Dr. Angulo, a senior marine scientist at the University of Havana, is also worried about the effects that a flood of American tourists and American dollars might have on this country’s pristine coral reefs, mangrove forests, national parks and organic farms — environmental assets that are a source of pride here.
“Like anywhere else, money talks,” Dr. Angulo said. “That might be dangerous, because if we go too much on that side, we lose what we have today.”
As relations between the United States and Cuba have warmed — the countries announced on Wednesday that their embassies in Havana and Washington would reopen by July 20 for the first time in more than 50 years — and as the renewal of trade seems more of a possibility, the Cuban government faces pivotal choices.
The country is in desperate need of the economic benefits that a lifting of the embargo would almost certainly bring. But the ban, combined with Cuba’s brand of controlled socialism, has also limited development and tourism that in other countries, including many of Cuba’s Caribbean neighbors, have eroded beaches, destroyed forests, polluted rivers, damaged coral reefs and wreaked other forms of environmental havoc.
