Megatourism, intensive fishing, and sewage, sewage, sewage

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Cuba has an estimated 1,336 miles of almost continuous reef along its north coast, and 1,128 miles in the south. Thanks to a lack of coastal development, these reefs are reportedly among the most pristine in the Caribbean, but they and their dependent fisheries have still deteriorated, thanks in part to sewage, oil-related pollution, and mining and industrial discharges.

The U.S. embargo against Cuba may have served one useful purpose: By keeping gringo visitation down, it has largely sheltered Cuba's thousands of small island reefs from tourism, making them a baseline against which scientists "can measure impacts and changes in the years ahead, and that's pretty valuable stuff," Bill Belleville, an Orlando environmental writer, told the Orlando Sentinel in December 1997. "Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean. It's got a very healthy rate of biodiversity. The question is: Does this exist in water as well?" Belleville was speaking on the eve of the departure of an American scientific expedition to Cuba to study the reefs and ocean trenches off the island's coast.