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The Cuban Marine Protected Area System

Reinaldo Estrada

National Center for Protected Areas, PLAYA, CUBA

Theme: TH2

Designing and implementing marine protected areas (MPAs) in Cuba has recently begun to be deeply and integrally addressed. This situation has occurred due to different reasons, i.e. poor knowledge of marine areas, existence of a deeply rooted tradition consisting of working on the above-sea-level part of the territory, both as far as studies and protected area implementation are concerned; the latter being influenced by how costly it is to address management of marine territories requiring at least safe boats and communications, as well as specialized personnel. The main guidelines followed to set up strictly-protected areas (IUCN Categ. IV) in the marine environment have been the existence of well-preserved coral formations, and the presence of outstanding populations of species that are important from the conservation or economic viewpoints. When designing the demarcation for these areas, the rule followed has been the inclusion of different ecosystems in order to have an integral or ecosystem conservation concept, with predominance of rather extensive protected areas. Another very common case has been the fact that a proposed protected land area extends towards the sea. The current process of proposing these areas, the coverage analyses – the representativeness of these areas and an analysis of their design - constitute the main objective of this work. In Cuba, there are over 84 proposed protected areas (29 of them are considered to have national significance for their terrestrial or marine values) with a marine-coastal component (with mangrove forests considered part of the marine component) that occupy approximately 25% of the insular shelf. In around 20 of the proposed protected areas, the marine component (in many cases coral reefs, and mangrove forests to a lesser extent) is either very important or the most important element of the site. Of these, eleven areas are of national significance.