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Celebration for Cuba's Caibarién Coast |
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By Patricia Grogg*
Children are working to clean up a bay in northern Cuba, and convincing residents to change their polluting habits. In May they will celebrate all that the ocean gives their community.
SANTA CLARA, Cuba - Caibarién Bay, in northern Cuba, until recently looked like a big dump, full of floating garbage. Now, a lovely path follows the coast and the water looks clean, thanks to the efforts of local residents -- who in the past were themselves responsible for the pollution.
''The house patios faced the sea, and it was considered normal to throw all kinds of garbage into the water, instead of using the community truck services,'' Aleida Duque, an environmental education expert with the coastal monitoring station in Caibarién, a coastal town in Villa Clara province.
The 'malecón', as Cubans refer to coastal avenues, was completed three years ago, but it was not enough to leave behind the unhealthy tradition of dumping waste in nearby waters. So a group of children took the matter into their own hands, knocking on doors and convincing their neighbors that cleaning up the bay was the responsibility of everyone.
The project, ''Caimale'' (from Caibarién-malecón), calls for ''appropriate environmental conduct'', and came to being with 12 girls and boys organized by María Inés Domínguez, director of the governmental educational information agency, CDIP, in this city of 40,000 people.
''We began with 'operation knock-knock', house by house. At first there was resistance. They would tell us that they have always been dumping garbage in the sea and that they never saw any fish die from it. But little by little, the families were convinced,'' said Domínguez.
Together with the community the children decided to carry out activities that include dances, singing, writing and painting workshops, clean-up days, and a festival of the sea every May 21.
''The sea is our source of life. We have to protect it,'' said 14-year-old Jennifer Martínez.
In the first collection effort, the garbage more than filled a truck. A year later, the waste only reached the half-way mark of the truckbed.
But domestic garbage is not the only source of pollution in the bay, which has been hurt by insufficient sewage treatment in Caibarién and the harmful waste from a sugar mill in the neighboring city of Remedios, just to mention the worst.
Runoff from the sugar mill, where alcohol is also manufactured, reaches the sea by the Guaní River, but when the flow is lower the pollutants are not flushed out.
''The dissolved oxygen is used up, causing the fish to die,'' explains Joan Hernández, head of the coastal monitoring station, part of the government Environmental Services and Research Center, in Villa Clara.
The problem was resolved in part by a biogas plant that consumes 70 percent of the sugar mill waste, but the environmental impact of the remaining 30 percent is still considered high.
Now, the harvest season coincides with the drought, which keeps the river flow volume at a minimum. This means that waste accumulates and, with the first major rainfall, it will all reach the sea at once.
Meanwhile, the technological renovation of the larger of two tanneries in the city eliminated the chemical products in treating the leather and considerably reduced the runoff of highly toxic waste into the marine habitat.
''The municipal government has alternatives for resolving this environmental situation, but they are complicated and costly,'' said Ernesto Nieto, coordinator of the development project for the Sabana-Camagüey archipelago.
This vast plan has been under way since 1995 with the backing of the United Nations Development Program throughout north and central Cuba, extending from Matanzas to Camagüey, from 100 to 533 km from Havana.
Community education about the responsible use of the land and its resources for the conservation of nature is among the objectives of the program, which involves numerous institutions in Cuba.
The people of Caibarién live mostly from fishing, farming and small industry, and in recent years have expanded to tourism, based on development of the keys to the northeast of the city.
* Patricia Grogg is an IPS correspondent.
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