Fifty years after Fidel and Che mocked golf, Cuba's regime is in thrall
to this most ungreen of activities
Isabel Hilton
Drive along the coast road in Cuba that passes the Bay of Pigs in spring
or early summer, and you risk a distressing sight: a stretch of road,
some 20 miles long, carpeted in a thick coating of crushed crabs.
Cuba's red land crabs have evolved to live in the moist tropical
forests, but every year the females return to the sea to breed. For tens
of thousands of years, this mass migration was not a problem; then
Cuba's planners built a trunk road straight through the migration route.
It could only have one result – an uneven contest between crab and
truck. They keep on coming, big red female crabs, rearing up with their
claws to slash at vehicles, before being smashed to bits.
Driving across the crunching layer of crab, I began to suspect that
environmental impact assessments did not count for much in Cuba's
planning process. The news that the government is planning to cover much
of the island in golf courses suggests, in that respect at least, that
not much has changed.
There is a history to Cuba's affair with this most bourgeois of games.
Before the 1959 revolution Cuba hosted golf as well as gambling in its
role as North America's tropical playground. After the revolution, both
pursuits fell out of favour, symbols of an alien decadence that had no
place in the new workers' paradise. When Che Guevara and Fidel Castro
were photographed playing a round of golf in 1961, just a month before
the Bay of Pigs invasion, the intent was not to rehabilitate the game,
or even to take possession of it. The two revolutionaries played in
their customary fatigues and their technique did not convince. The image
they presented was satiric and defiant, like a pair of schoolboys
driving a rich uncle's car.
Out of Cuba's dozen or so top-flight courses, only one survived the
revolution – that of the Varadero Golf Club, in Cuba's most commercial
beach resort. But the tourism ministry has been pressing for years to
rehabilitate golf to lure rich foreigners and give them a reason to stay
and spend. Several schemes involving both golf courses and luxury hotels
have been in the planning stage for years, with foreign developers keen
to get started. Now, to boost foreign currency revenues, the government
seems likely to give them the green light.
Such schemes, though, remain contentious for ordinary Cubans. Resorts
are largely off limits to local people, creating ghettos of privilege
and exclusion for foreign visitors, but depriving the island's citizens
of access to their own best beaches. The only Cubans likely to set foot
inside golf resorts are waiters, chambermaids, groundsmen, caddies and
prostitutes whose mission it is to keep well-heeled foreigners happy.
Fifty years after the revolution, how much has changed?
One thing, though, has changed. Fifty years ago water resources were
more abundant and more reliable, allowing for Caribbean variations, than
they are today. Last month the government admitted that nearly 70% of
the island is suffering from a drought that began in 2008 and has caused
reservoir levels to drop by half. The pattern of droughts in Cuba shows
that they have grown more frequent and intense over the last 40 years, a
pattern that could continue.
Golf is one of the least sustainable activities ever dreamed up in its
excessive use of water, pesticides and fertilisers, and the issues
around where courses are built. Developments like Cuba's are, by design,
exclusive. But they also appropriate resources that may already be in
short supply. A luxury apartment building or resort hotel uses many
times more water than a local community; a golf course competes with
hard-pressed local agriculture for land and water. This time, it's not
just the crabs that are likely to suffer from Cuba's environmental
indifference.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/may/06/cuba-revolution-gold-che-fidel
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