Beauty grows in a “garden quite contrary”

The remaining trace of Americanism at the Cienfuegos Botanical Garden is carved into a tall royal palm. The inscription, “Harvard Biological Laboratory”, is decorated into Cuba’s national tree which stands outside what once was called the Harvard House, now home to a library and offices belonging to the communist government-run garden.

Americans had managed a sugar plantation and adjoining botanical center outside the port city of Cienfuegos for 80 years before Fidel Castro’s communist revolution took power in 1959. The Americans were eventually driven out. The socialists renamed this community Pepito Tey, after a revolutionary killed in the tumult. Initially, the rural community had been called Soledad, or solitude, developed by a Boston Brahmin and sugar trader, Edwin Atkins, who began visiting Cuba at the age of 14 in the 1860s.

In the 1880’s, Atkins took over a plantation in a foreclosure. After a while, he set up a garden for research to improve sugar production. Harvard's involvement, in what in time became the garden, began in 1899 with a donation of $2,500 for a traveling fellowship in botany. According to university publications provided by Harvard officials, this gesture was followed  in 1919 by a gift of $100,000. The revolutionaries kicked out the Atkins family in 1959, and Harvard’s association ended in 1961. The family's old sugar works today is nothing more than a steel skeleton, being left alone to suffer the decline in the island's sugar harvests. Nevertheless, the botanical garden flourishes.

The 222-acre preserve now stands as Cuba's oldest and most admired botanical garden, drawing 20,000 visitors a year, according to staff members. The National Botanical Garden outside Havana is much larger at 1,500 acres, but it was founded in 1968 and lacks the champion trees that reign over the sanctuary near Cienfuegos.

Cuba aims to preserve ecologically functional dunes

The stunningly beautiful and ecologically functional dunes in the Jardines del Rey, an archipelago on Cuba´s north coast, are being observed and controlled since this is one of the island´s main tourist areas, with some 3,600 rooms distributed amongst twelve hotels. Therefore, the Cuban government approved law-ranking decree 212, which limits the actions of human beings and controls investment activities that can be carried out in the vicinities of these natural systems formed at the borders of seas, lakes and deserts.

 The dunes in the Jardines del Rey are considered amid the largest in Cuba and the Caribbean region, and are in good condition according to the latest monitoring reports. The function of dunes is essential in the conservation of beaches. They act as barriers against the action of waves, tides and salt wind and are a source of sand for the beach during periods of erosion. Their colonization by plants gives them a flexible function as sand traps and self-consolidation after exposure to heavy storm waves. Studies reveal that the sand elevations on Cuba’s north coast are sustaining their physical parameters and vegetation levels, with the mounds enjoying plants that are endemic to the area.