Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue podcast session 156. What's up everybody? I am back from my Cuban trip and I am rested, relaxed, and ready to rock this episode out. I'm going to tell you all about my trip, some of the things that I liked about and some of the things I didn't in terms of the environment and the way Cubans live in terms of environmental protection and ocean conservation. It's good news, to be honest, and I can't wait to share it with you. So stay tuned for this episode of the Speak Up For Blue podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, he still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care. Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue podcast. Last year voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right, I am an entrepreneur, I am an entrepreneur, and I do everything to protect the ocean. So that's why I call myself an ocean printer. And it took me a while to get that intro out because I haven't recorded it in over a week because I pre-record all of last week's episodes. If you haven't listened to them, you can do so, it's 153, 54, and 56, or 55, sorry. And I had a great time doing them, and on my vacation I did, of course, I didn't record because I was just relaxing, and I actually unplugged for a little bit from the internet, which I'll tell you all about in this episode. But it's been a while, so that introduction took me a while to do. I did a couple of takes because I kept messing up. But anyway, I wanted to start off this episode by just thanking you guys for continually listening to the show and all the great comments that I keep receiving. I received a wonderful comment on my Facebook page the other day, which was all about just, you know, the person was so excited that they found the podcast, and now they're addicted to it and they keep listening to it, and I'm so happy they are. And I hope you do too. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, essentially, I record three times a week and it's all about ocean conservation. On Mondays, I kind of cover things that I've done or that I want you guys to know about in terms of an awareness of a specific issue that I've researched or a trip that I've been on, which will be today's episode. Wednesday, I usually try and interview somebody, if not, I tell you about the ocean news. And then on Friday, we have Nathan Johnson, one of our speaker for Blue Team members on the podcast, and we talk about some of the major articles that have hit this past week, and we essentially have an ocean talk Friday, what we call it. And we discuss it and give our opinions on it, which is always a lot of fun to do and a lot of fun to listen to. So that's essentially what we do during the week, and we throw some other things in here and there. So subscribe to the, if this is your first time, subscribe to the podcast. And if you like it, write a review, five star preferably on iTunes, and so we can get more people listening to it because the higher we're rated in iTunes, the more people we reach, because it just kind of climbs up the charts and iTunes and Apple kind of place us in a more favorable position where more people can actually listen to us. So that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to increase our reach and increase the awareness that of what's happening in the ocean and how we can implement solutions to those problems, and then essentially reduce the problems and hopefully eliminate them eventually. So we're doing our part, which a lot of other people in ocean conservation are doing, we're doing our part and helping that so you guys can help us out by increasing our reach and providing us a review. So it's always good to look at the criticism whether good or bad. It's always good to look at that and how we can improve to essentially make you guys happier and make you guys interested in ocean conservation. So with that said, again, thank you very much for listening. I really appreciate it. And let's get into today's episode. I just came back from a family trip to Cuba. And the reason I wanted to talk about it was because one, going to Cuba, before I went to Cuba, I had no idea what to expect because I didn't know much about Cuba. I didn't know much about the environment. I didn't know much about the country itself in terms of population, what makes up the population and so forth. And I was kind of going in there with a bit of a blind eye. I knew a bit about the politics, you know, obviously it's a communist country. You know, most things I really knew about it was how Fidel Castro, I watched one movie about how Fidel Castro and his army led by Che Guevara, you know, took over power in Cuba back in that. I believe it was the 50s, the great movie that was interesting, that really documented mostly what Che Guevara was all about. But it was a kind of an interesting aspect. And that's really what I knew about the country and of course the Cuban Missile Crisis, which doesn't put Cuba in a favorable light for the Western world anyway. And me being from Canada, I mean, I just didn't know a lot about it, but I know Canadians went there on a regular basis because we don't have an embargo against Cuba. So we're allowed to go there whenever we want it. In fact, I would say 90% of the tourists that go to Cuba are Canadian. So there was a lot of other fellow Canadians out there or down there and we had a great time there. And I know I believe it's August is when the American embargo will probably be lifted and Americans can go down there. So that'll be interesting to see what happens there just in terms of more tourism and what not. But it was kind of interesting going down there. And I wanted to talk about the Cuban Ocean environment while I was down there, what I saw of it anyway, and my observations from it. Just because a lot of you guys, the audience are from the U.S. and you don't know much about the Cuban, well, you may not know much about the Cuban environment because either you haven't been there or you just, you only know certain aspects of it. So I thought it'd be kind of interesting to share my experience, my family's experience going down there. It's kind of an interesting topic to talk about on this podcast. Plus I had a lot of positive things to say about Cuba. I was very impressed by the country, by the infrastructure and the way I don't know much about the still about their environmental policy, but the way they conduct their business in terms of the environment. So let's get into it. So the way it started was my wife and I wanted to take a trip. We want to take our girls who are six and eight now, turning seven and nine this year. We want to take them on a trip down south. We were thinking something quick. We were going to think about going to the state somewhere along the southern states. But the problem is, is our American dollar, the American dollar is so much higher when we were planning the trip that it didn't make sense financially to go to the states right now because the American dollar was so much higher than the Canadian. It cost us 1.4 more of everything. So it just wasn't, it just financially just didn't make sense. We were just going to wait to go to the states another time when the dollar is a little better. The Canadian dollar is a little better. Now, so we decided to go somewhere south to an all inclusive resort. We don't normally go to an all inclusive resort. I've been to maybe two in my entire life. I usually, when we go down south to the Caribbean Islands, we've done in the past with my family, my dad, my mom, my brother, and of course my wife and my kids. We go down as a family, we rent a house and we really get into the culture. We go to the grocery stores, we go to the local restaurants and local areas and really soak in. I mean, we still do touristy things, but we really soak in the culture and how people live and I think it's a better way to travel for us anyway. I get a lot more out of it. My girls get a lot more out of it and we really enjoy it, but we decided to just do one quick vacation. We want to make it as cheap as possible just because renting it, when you go down there, rent a house, it doesn't make sense for four people to rent a house, but if you have more than four or more than two families or two people like that would require more than, one family or two families or two family members, sorry, more than four family members where you would require more than one hotel room, we usually rent a house, but it's expensive to rent a house for just four people, so we decide, you know what, let's just go to an all-inclusive resort, we don't have to worry about anything, we just really need to decompress from our regular routines, our jobs, and just go down to, to go down to some Caribbean island. So we did, we did a search, we've known people who've gone to a lot of different places, Dominican Republic, we've gone to Jamaica a couple of times, there's Puerto Rico, which of course is the US, so we kind of want to avoid that, just because of the, like I said, the dollar was, wasn't in the greatest shape at the time, and then, so there's all the Antilles and Eastern Antilles and Eastern islands and St. Lucia and stuff like that, and then we started to look up deals and, and we found Cuba had a great deal in May, beginning May end of April, it was April 30th and May 7th was the week we picked, and it was Cuba that kind of won out financially, and we've had people who've gone there, we knew people who were going there this past, this past winter, when we booked, and we decided, you know what, let's go to Cuba, because it was such a great deal. Now for the four of us, all-inclusive resort, it cost us $2,600 in Canadian. That is an amazing deal, you don't normally see that, it usually costs $2,600 just for two adults, so basically we were paying for the two adults, and the kids were free, and it was like, you know, we were pretty excited, we've never really been to Cuba, like I said, we didn't know much about Cuba, but we knew people who had gone, and they really enjoyed it, so we're like, okay, let's do this, we're really excited, I was excited because I want to go scuba diving, and I didn't know much about, you know, that wildlife aspect and the ocean aspect, and I knew though it was in great condition, I've heard a lot of good things about Cuba and how the ocean environment is in much better condition than a lot of the other Caribbean islands, and I was just, I was excited, so, and of course I was not disappointed, so yeah, so it was great, but now we were going to an all-inclusive resort, and I was a little worried about an all-inclusive resort, because one, there's a lot of waste at an all-inclusive resort in terms of food and drinks, and I'll tell you why in just a little bit, I was also worried about when you go to an island, you go to these all-inclusive resorts, they're massive, and I'm worried about how they're built and how they affect the environment. Now, I've seen some that have been very good resorts, I'm not going to name the resorts, but they've been very great good resorts that I've actually stayed on, but I was disappointed in the beach because it looked like a man-made beach, and they look like they've destroyed part of the coastline to put in this beach, and I think it's to appease the tourists and the people who are their clientele who are going to be staying there to have this idealistic view of what a beach and what the ocean around that beach should be, a lot of people want to be able to swim in that ocean, and sometimes the ocean doesn't really cooperate, it could be rough, or along the coastline, there's mangroves, or there's a lot of reefs around there that make it a little difficult to swim or just to kind of wade in the water, so a lot of times these companies will come in, they'll build a resort, and then they'll destroy all the mangroves around it and maybe clear out some reefs so that it's a nice open ocean when they get in there and you get the clear blue water, the turquoise water, and then all the different shades of blue that you have and it's just this picturesque thing that you would see in a magazine, and it disappoints me when I see that because I know the environment's getting damaged, and that doesn't just damage the environment, but it damages the local people around there, it makes that part of the coast very sustainable to storm surges, sea level rise, and so forth, and it gets me very worried when I see that, so I was worried going in that I was going to see the same thing, and of course, you know, being how I talk about it on speaker for blue, I'm worried about it, am I supporting something that is not, you know, sustainable, am I supporting something that destroys the environment instead of sort of lives with the environment or uses the environment to secure its own area, so I was a bit concerned about that because I hadn't done a lot of research because we went based on price, so I have to admit I was, I didn't do my research, I was a bit worried, I actually worried a lot when I went down there, so I was like okay, well let's just see what happens, and I have to admit I had the opposite effect. Our major purpose going down there was to relax as a family, get out of our daily routine, our daily routine is pretty hectic when I come home, you've heard my, what my daily routine is, and my wife is just as hectic, essentially I'll go over it quickly when I, I get up around quarter to five in the morning, 4.30, 4.45 in the morning, I go out take the dog for a walk, I go to, I'm at the gym by 6am to 7am, I come home so my wife can go to work, I get the kids ready to go to school between seven and nine essentially, go to work from nine to five, come home, be with the kids, do the activity, the rush off to some kind of activity, or just spend time with the kids now that it's nice outside, go on our bikes or something like that, have some family time, basically between five o'clock and eight o'clock at night till they go to bed, then I basically come back and I work on Speak Up For Blue for most of the night until I go to bed, and I start all over again. My wife is just the same, she's got to get up, get to work by 7.30, come home about 4.40, you know, we always together we try and get dinner ready, spend time with the kids, and then she kind of does some extra work at eight or after eight, or you know, just kind of decompresses for the next day and goes to bed quite early because she has to be up quite early. So our days are pretty hectic, we love our life, but it's quite hectic, so every once in a while we need to decompress, and if we're stressed at work or at home or whatever it is, we need to decompress at least once a year, and we're very fortunate to have the vacation time and the money to travel to do that decompression. So our major purpose out there was to just decompress and spend time with the family where we're not rushing everywhere, we're not trying to get to an activity, we're not trying to do so, and we're just kind of relaxing on the beach, go to the pool in the afternoon, hit a couple of buffets, or a couple of meals and whatnot, and just have a great time. And I have to admit, the result was relaxation and decompression was achieved, and it really reset us. Like I said, the beginning of the show, I'm relaxed, I've reset, and I'm ready to roll again. And I think that's important for everybody to do that because it makes our lives easier, it makes us happier, and we're around beautiful blue water, which was fantastic, and a wonderful natural beach, loved it. So I was pretty happy with that. The other thing that was kind of cool, which I didn't think it would be that cool when I first got there, was there was no Wi-Fi throughout the resort. It made it very difficult for me to connect to the internet. In fact, I couldn't even connect to the internet most of the time. The only Wi-Fi that was available was at the lobby, and you had to pay two pesos, two Cuban pesos per hour of internet, and my wife needed it for work. So we kind of split that time up, but she got a little bit longer than I did. So I didn't really even connect to the internet, I didn't really go on Facebook, I didn't really go anywhere else. It was just kind of an interesting experiment of being a weak, unplugged, and unconnected. I didn't even go on my computer, which is odd for me, very, very odd. So it was quite interesting in that regard. But it was a very big surprise, it was a surprise that I enjoyed it, and that I got to really think about what I wanted in life, what I wanted outside of life, and what I wanted to do with my life. I got to really reflect by just staring into the ocean, and it was just a wonderful thing to do. Really following in the steps of Wallace J. Nichols, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols in his book, The Blue Mind, where he was saying, you know, when we see blue, we actually relax, we're comfortable, and we really go down to the ocean when we're on vacation, or we want to relax because it's so relaxing, and has that sort of effect on us. That color blue is just a wonderful effect, and of course the ocean is blue, and down where we were staying in Santa Maria, on a KO Santa Maria is where we were staying. It's a chain of islands that are just in the middle part of Cuba, on the northern side of the island, and it was just a wonderful experience, and I want to tell you all about that experience, but I really stared into the ocean for hours. I didn't read a magazine, sometimes I read a book, but I really just read the book on the plane, and I just kind of stared there and just enjoyed myself. It was just such a wonderful time, for most of the time that I was on the beach, I was in the water staring out, or I was on the beach just kind of staring out because I loved it. Building sandcastles with my kids, running around, going walks up and down the beach, it was just a wonderful time, so the big result of our purpose there was achieved. We definitely relaxed as a family, and didn't run around, and it was a lot of fun, but there's a lot of things that I liked about the resort. There's some things that I didn't like about the resort, but there were a lot of things that I did like about the resort, and the first part of it is how the resort was built. Like I said before, a lot of times the resorts were built right close to the beach, where you can see the beach from the resort, and you can access it really easily, but it leaves the, not only does it leave the hotel vulnerable to storm surges, or any kind of sea level rise effect over the long term, but it becomes a problem just in terms of the coastline and securing that coastline, and making sure that coastline stays intact. So what I really liked about this resort, it was set back quite a ways from the beach. So from the lobby of this hotel, you could not see the beach, and it was kind of nice. You can see the water in the distance, but you couldn't see the beach. It was probably a good couple of football fields away, so 200 yards away from the lobby was the beach. You had to walk down a pathway where there were a bunch of restaurants and shops, and then a boardwalk started that really consisted of sand and mangroves everywhere. Now I don't know mangroves very well, so I don't know the exact type, but these were very, these were mangroves that were used to the dryness, because they weren't in the water. But it was probably a good 100 yards of mangroves, and then there was the beach. You go down the, so after you go down this boardwalk that goes through those mangroves, you go down down these couple steps and you're at the beach. The beach wasn't that far from the mangroves, and after the mangroves it kind of just dipped down from the sand, and what you noticed when you first got, what I noticed when I first got there, obviously other than the ocean, was when I turned around, I noticed that there were a lot of, like the beach was elevated, but it was elevated, it looks like reinforced by rocks, like these massive boulders that were covered in sand. You could barely see them, but you knew they were there because it was elevated. That really secured that, that side of the beach, or that part of the beach. And it, it just allowed, not only to secure the resort, the vulnerability to the resort, or decrease the vulnerability to the resort, but it actually secured that beach to make sure that the erosion wasn't going to happen. And then it, there was quite a ways to the, to the water. I guess maybe probably about 50 to 70 feet to the actual edge of the water of where the tide would come up in most spots. And it was just great. It was just wonderful. It was just open ocean after that. So the waves were allowed to come. So if it was windy, it would be rough, it would be wavy. You could surf in the waves in terms of like, what I like to call body surf in the waves, just run into the waves. It wasn't too rough where it didn't, it wouldn't harm you. There weren't any riptides that we saw that, that week that we were there, quite beautiful in terms of the different types of blue from turquoise, dirt, blue to light blue to dark blue, and so forth, it was quite nice. I'll put a picture of it, there's, I have a picture of a beautiful picture of the beach at sunset. I'll put it up on the feature image of this blog post that for the show notes, which will be speakerforblue.com/session156. Anyway, it was just, it was beautiful. There were mangroves, so there's the beach. You had the security of that, those boulders that were up in most parts of the beach. And then up above that was the, was the, was the, like a hundred yards of mangroves. It was wonderful, like these were beautiful mangroves, pristine. They were just full and it was just everywhere, and it was actually quite nice. You saw a lot of animals going in and out of it, a lot of lizards that we saw, different types of lizards, again, I don't know my reptiles very well, but different colors and so forth. It was just really nice, just to see a natural coastline, as natural as you can get, with a bit of protection to maintain that beach. And it wasn't everywhere, but it was just a bit of protection. And I really like to see that because it didn't look like the coastline was compromised because of the resort. And in fact, it looked like it was, it was more secure because of that. And it was just great. Now that ocean can get rough. There could be a lot of waves that come back and that, that come in just because it is the open ocean. It's the Caribbean Sea when you, when you see that, or probably the beginning of the Gulf of Mexico, one of the mouths of the Gulf of Mexico, if you go, if you go west. So it was just kind of nice to see that. It was just really, it was just really wonderful. So that was really nice to see when I first got there. Now, the other thing that I was, that I was worried about was the waste. You're going to an all inclusive resort. There's going to be lots of waste because everybody can eat as much as they want and they can drink as much as they want. The food part, I saw a lot of waste in terms of people not fishing their food or not, you know, having something, grabbing something from the buffet and not finishing it. There's probably a lot of food waste. How that got disposed of behind the scenes, I didn't see, but there was a lot of food waste. I don't know how that was used or how that was disposed of. So I can't really comment on that. I hope that it's put into like this big organic bin and used, you know, eventually a soil or something like that as it decomposes, but I don't know. But I could see and what a little bit of a disappointment I was worried about, but it wasn't too bad because of the people that were there were the, was the drinking. So the drinks, a lot of times were served if you ordered a drink, whether it be water or an alcoholic beverage or juice or whatever it was, was served in these little plastic cups and they were small, they were thin and they were small. And I guess they do that so you don't drink as much, but it was disappointing to see because that was a lot of waste and those would get thrown out or they get, you know, thrown on the ground by the pool or something like that or they'd be, you know, people would just try to put it, bearing them in the sand like just so they could put up beside them and then we forget about them or not or whatnot. And that was a little disappointing to see. However, most of the guests would bring their own reusable containers, whether it be a mug or what they call a little Bubba, which is like a big, a big, like a thermos. So a lot of people had those, which was really cool to see a lot of people. I would say 85 to 90% of the people brought those. I didn't bring one, which was disappointing to me because I didn't go there to drink a lot. I was going there and spend family time. So I would have liked it for water, but I use, I reuse the plastic cup that I had. So I just kept reusing that as much as possible. But you know, a lot of people had that now. I don't know if it's a comment on the, how much they wanted to drink in terms of alcohol they wanted to drink and not go back to the bar all the time because when you're on the beach, you want to stay on the beach. You don't want to go up to the bar, the beach bar and come back down again that many times. So you want to bring one of these bigger reusable mugs or thermoses or whatever it is so that you can keep your one. You can keep your drink cold. And the other one, you don't have to keep going back getting drink. So I don't know if it's a testament to how much of alcoholics these people are or wanted to drink and get drunk on the beach or is it the fact that they're trying to be environmentally conscious? Either way, it got to be both, I guess. And it was kind of nice to see that there would be a lot of people who kind of took on that strategy because they use less, you know, less drinks, less cups. So that was kind of cool to see. The other thing is when I know something like, okay, well, how are these cups disposed of? Because if they're using a lot of cups, you would think that the recycling program would be really good there. And it was to a certain point, but I was a little disappointed in one part of it. So the main pathway from the lobby to the beach was like I said before, where a lot of the restaurants were, the Allakkart restaurants were, and a lot of the shops and snack bars and stuff were. Those garbages along there, they had four different types of garbages. They had a plastic, cans, glass, and then waste, so everything else. And you would sort them, you know, appropriately and put them in. And because a lot of people are from Canada and we have a good waste management system, a lot of people enjoy to see that. I heard a couple comments back, oh, they really sort their garbages here. That was kind of cool to see. And it was kind of nice to see, but however, that was only on the main path. There were a lot of smaller paths that go to the rooms and stuff where they had garbages everywhere. And that was found like they were, they didn't have those types of garb, that type of sorting system. They just had one garbage. So you'd see a lot of the plastic, the glass, the waste, organics, everything would go in the same garbage, showing me, kind of telling me that they didn't really have a system in there on the resort to really sort that it was more of a show type of thing, which I hope it's not because I'd be very disappointed in that, but I have a feeling that's the case. So that's the one thing that, that disappointed me. I hope that they use that sorting systems to kind of, to kind of use in their waste management, but I don't know much about it. I don't know much about the Cuban waste system, I don't know much about Cuban general. So I'm going to try and find out a little bit more of how they actually do that if they actually follow those kind of practices. But anyway, it was kind of cool to see. And I think it's, I hope in the future as they get more tourism, because tourism is their largest, their largest sort of revenue system in the country. And I think the other one is sugar cane after that. But tourism is their big industry. And so they want to make sure that as tourism grows, their environmental protection stays the same and grows with it, right, that protection aspect, especially in August when they're going to get, they potentially might have a flood of American tourists that are coming out onto the island. They are building a lot, a lot of resorts and a lot of hotels in the area that we were staying at. And that's one of the popular areas and there are a number of popular areas that people like to stay, Veradero is another area, there's a southern part of the island as well that people like to go to. So I hope that their waste management system is built to accommodate that influx of people and the influx of waste. Now the one good thing that, like I said before, in Canada, we're used to sorting. We're used to having the different types of garbages. We have recycling organics and then of course yard waste and whatnot. Those are all sorted appropriately, we're told what can be recycled, what can't, and I know there is still problems with recycling but at least we have it and it's decent to a certain point. But I hope that the Cubans have the same kind of system or at least develop them soon. The one thing I did notice in the ocean itself was that, and this has happened in other countries. So when I was in Costa Rica about 60 years ago, we were on a beautiful beach, just like this one, but it was more of a bay. And the beach was immaculate when I got there, it had been hot for a long time, no storms and whatnot. We got there in May which is the beginning of their wet season, we got a big storm one night, a huge storm, and when the next morning, it was beautiful again, when I went to the beach, you saw everything that washed up from the ocean. All the plastics, microplastics, large plastic pieces, alcoholic bottles, sandals, debris, fishing nets, there was some dead fish, there was just a lot of glass and plastics was really the most that we saw on there, and it was everywhere. Now being in Cuba in May, it was the wet season, we had a couple of major storms. I went to the beach the next morning just to look to see if I'd find the same type of thing hoping that I wouldn't, and I didn't. There was a lot less, there was still some plastic pollution, there was some little bit of fishing nets, not much, but a little bit of netting of some sort. I don't know if it was fishing net or something there, there was some plastic bottle caps that I saw, but not a lot. There were some, so there was a plastic cups, but I think they were left there from the night before, but I didn't see a lot of stuff along the shore. I saw a lot of algae and seaweed, macroalgae and seaweed, which was fine because that's what you normally find, but not a lot of plastic, actually almost none that I could find. If I were to put a quadrat, a square that scientists used to count and quantify certain aspects within that, sometimes it's snail, sometimes it's animal, sometimes it's plastic pollution, I couldn't find any in a lot of those quadrats if I put those down. So that was kind of nice to see. That means that their oceans are fairly pristine in terms of plastic pollution. Now I don't know if it's just that beach because it's not populated by a lot of people, however there's a lot of resorts on those, there's about five resorts on that key or on those set of islands that were on, but there wasn't a lot of pollution. That was really nice to see, that was relieving, it gave me hope that the waste management system along that area was great. Now if you go to somewhere that's more populated like Santa Clara, which is one of their populated cities or Havana, which is also one of their populated cities, you might find something different just because there's a lot more people. There are 12 million people on the island. A lot of them are focused in, are populated in those city centers. That usually means there's a lot more plastic pollution there just because there's more people and there's more waste. But I can't tell for sure because I haven't been to those areas, but I would imagine that the plastic pollution would be a lot more in the ocean because of those city centers. So and it being such a high populated place. But there are five resorts that can probably hold a lot of people. I'm not going to like thousands of people. And in this area that's not used to that, you would expect to see a lot more plastic pollution, but I didn't, which is really nice to see. The other thing that I noticed as well was that, so we were on a key, we were on a set of islands that was built, there was a causeway built to get out to their 48 kilometer causeway that got apparently international awards for its protection of the environment, its engineering, its building and things like that. Normally what a causeway is if you don't know what is really an infill of land in the water that has a road on it that would give access from one area, like say in this area, from the mainland to these set of islands. Usually it blocks off everything so that fish and other animals and water really can't exchange within that inland part of the water. So or the water between the set of islands and the mainland. This causeway got environmental regards in the wars because they built a lot of bridges that would allow the flow of water to go in and out. And I noticed when, you know, we're there, the water in that area between the islands and the mainland, a lot of those shallow areas that we saw, they were surrounded by thousands of acres of, or hectares of mangroves. And it was awesome. They were beautiful, it was nice and green with blue shallow water, you know, you actually saw some of the shallows cause you can see the bottom. And when I went up close, we actually got to stop off the side, I can see so many different species of fish, just in those little areas. So mangroves, if you don't know, are coastal plant or coastal tree that has a very complex root system that goes out of the water and in the water and in the sand, not only does it secure the coast by just sort of making it solidifying it because of those roots, but it also provides those root systems provide protection for small and juvenile fish from predators. So usually what happens is those mangroves will feed into the reefs or the sea grass beds that are adjacent to it into the ocean and it provides that diversity, provides the abundance that you normally would expect on a reef. And that essentially is the, it's function, it's a couple of functions. So seeing all these mangroves, I was like, really, when I came into the resort, I was really excited to be like, wow, these reefs might be in good condition because you never know when you go to the islands, especially with this year, with the climate change that we've, the effects that we've seen, you know, the Great Barrier Reef, one of the largest reefs in the world is 93% bleached. You know, you're looking at these reefs here, you're like, well, a lot of the Caribbean reefs are probably bleached or they have diseases or they're not really well intact and so forth and there's not a lot of fish. I've gone diving in various islands where it's either been good or really bad or even just mediocre. So I wasn't too sure what I was expecting when I came into Cuba like this, but when I saw those mangroves, I got excited, I was like, ooh, and I've heard really good things about the reefs in Cuba, how they're untouched and they're protected and whatnot. And so when I looked at it, I was like, this is going to, when I saw the mangroves, I was like, this might be really good. When I was scuba diving on last Tuesday morning, did two dives, 45 minute dives each, about 48 feet or so, 12 meters, and I couldn't believe the wonder that I saw. I counted in the two dives, I counted over 40 species, 40 different species of fish alone. There were, the reef was primarily made up of sea fans and gargonians, which are corals. There were some, a little bit of multi-poric corals, which are hard, flat kind of corals. There were some like open brain corals, sclerotinic corals, but it was primarily gargonians, sponges and sea fans. And there were a lot of crevices, there were a lot of rock sort of kind of alleys, but between the rocks that were cut out between the reef rock and just fish everywhere. We saw barracuda, we saw different types of tangs, different types of butterfly fish. Just, it was just angel fish, it was just wonderful. I've never gone diving on a reef like this before. And to see that that many fish, I didn't really see that many invertebrates, to be honest, other than the corals. I didn't really see a lot of shrimp crabs and so forth, but I didn't really look as closely as I normally do. I did look out in some places, but I couldn't find them. Maybe I wasn't in the right place, I don't know. But there are a lot of fish, a lot of fish, a lot of corals, a lot of different types of sponges, a lot of different types of gargonians and sea fans and so forth. So it was just really nice to see. I saw barracuda, I saw amora eel. I did see two lionfish, but normally when I've gone to see lionfish, or when I see lionfish on a reef, they're everywhere. I only saw two in the two places that we went diving, and the one place had the two. So that was kind of nice to see, where it wasn't as many. Now maybe they're just starting to invade, I don't know. But a lot of other reefs that I've gone diving on, they're everywhere. So it was just kind of nice to see that they weren't everywhere here. Maybe it's their management system, I don't know. I asked the local divers, they said they don't really take them off the reef, but they just haven't really found a lot of them. So that was something that was really cool to see. So I was kind of happy to see that. And so yeah, so my reef dive was amazing. I don't really get to go on a lot of reef dives, just because I live up here in Canada, in Ontario. And of course, the lakes don't really have that type of reef because it's a fresh water body, but it was really, really cool to go and see that type of environment. And I'll tell you the reason why I think that there were over 40 species of fish and the reefs were intact and they weren't diseased, they weren't bleached, is they have time to recover. They don't have those chronic effects of water pollution, plastic pollution, netting, nutrients, the phosphorus and like that, just things that would normally affect reefs. These reefs were allowed to recover from any kind of climate change effects. They're allowed to recover from any kind of sea temperature increases because they don't have those chronic effects and they're healthy reefs. And when they're healthy like that, they can adapt to certain, you know, different, to certain range increases or decreases. And I think that is really why these reefs were so good. On top of that, you had intact mangroves, hectares, thousands of hectares of intact mangroves. And I think that helps feed into the reef. And I haven't seen any, I didn't see any seagrass beds but I'm sure they were there because I saw seagrass wash up on the beach. So I'm sure they were there. Though both the seagrass beds and the mangroves have been shown through research to provide a nice complex, a nice habitat complex of stages, life or life stages of different fish invertebrates and so forth, allowing the reefs, allowing the seagrass beds and allowing the mangroves to be full of diverse species and abundance of species. So that was really, really nice to see. So all in all, my trip was amazing. And you know, we got to relax as a family, we got to enjoy stuff as a family, I got to scuba dive, I saw beautiful reefs, you know, the way the Cubans build their resorts and keep their, you know, and build causeways and keep their environment intact as much as possible to the point where their reefs are abundant and diverse of wonderful species, coral species and fish species and so forth, that makes me happy. That gives me a lot of hope that other places could provide the same type of protections. Now it might be a little harder because they didn't put in those policies into place. Now one rumor that I did here before I left was Fidel Castro, the person who has been in charge for the last however many years, 40 years, 50 years, from the communist, of a communist Cuba that he implemented communism in Cuba, was a huge advocate of scuba diving and was one of the first people to scuba dive. This is what I've heard from friends and he put in these protections to make sure that these reefs were as healthy as possible and to make sure that their coastline was healthy as possible because not only did he want to see that on his dies but he wanted to protect it, he had an affinity for protection of their environment. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the US embargo kind of comes up and there's more technology allowed in, there's more people that will be allowed in, more tourism. That will be interesting to see how it's handled and that growth is handled because Cuba is a great country, the Cuban people are very friendly, they love Canadians because there are a lot of Canadians that go down there and they accommodate us as tourists, they're very, very friendly, they help us out whenever we need it and they're actually a million Canadians that live in Cuba which is kind of cool to hear about, I didn't know about that out of the 12 million population that they have. So it's kind of an interesting, something that I learned a lot about a different culture, I learned a lot about a different environment and I learned a lot of how that culture protects their environment. And I think that's kind of a cool thing and I want to dive in more and there's a guest that I want to have on this show to talk more about how Cuba really relates to protection of their ocean environment and how they value their ocean environment and I think that'll be important, an important podcast especially for you, for those audience members who don't know much about Cuba like myself. So I'm glad, I'm thankful that you actually listened to this episode, I hope you enjoyed it, I really do because I enjoyed the trip and if you're from the US and you plan on going to Cuba, you know, bring a, and you go to an all-inclusive resort, bring a reasonable mug or something reasonable that you can have your water, your alcoholic drinks, your non-alcoholic drinks, just decrease the waste of the plastic cups, if anybody's going to any all-inclusive, anywhere in the Caribbean, do that, you know, you bring a reusable mug or a reusable container that you can drink out of because I think that will be very helpful in reducing a lot of the waste that happens at these places and of course the food waste and everything like that, try not to waste too much food even though it's all-inclusive. So that's sort of what I would suggest when you go to an all-inclusive resort and of course be very aware of the impact that you have on the ocean, nothing in the beach, whatever you bring, you bring back, dispose of it properly, if you see somebody doing the same, not doing the same thing, help them out, explain to them or just bring it yourself, bring it back yourself, just do what you can to be great ocean stewards and bring, be great, speak up for blue community members. So thank you very much for listening, all the show notes that we have for this episode will be on speakupforblue.com/session156 and I really appreciate you listening to this episode, any comments put on the show notes, love to hear your comments, if you've been to Cuba, if you haven't been to Cuba, if you want to go to Cuba, you're excited about the lift of the U.S. embargo so that you can actually go to Cuba, let me know in the comments on those show notes or hit me up at my email address is "allewain@spatialconserve.com" and that will be on the show notes or it will be somewhere on my website that you can actually go to. So thank you very much for listening, you have been listening to this speakup for the podcast, enjoy your Monday and enjoy the rest of the week, we'll be back on Wednesday with another episode and happy conservation, see you later.
