A cuban farmer stands in his tobacco field. Photo by Guillaume Baviere/Flickr.

It would be tragic if the Trump administration’s economic assault on Cuba not only reimposed exploitative colonialism, but also erased the island nation’s little-known but world-leading efforts to address climate change.

On a recent solidarity tour of small co-operative and family-run agro-ecological farms in Cuba, our group of 17 Canadians and five Americans, led by Ron Berezan, farm manager of Powell River’s Blueberry Commons, arrived at Varadero airport in early February, expecting Caribbean heat.

Instead, we found the weather astonishingly similar to home. On February 3, a nearby weather station recorded a temperature of 0.1°C—Cuba’s coldest dawn ever recorded, and actually eight degrees chillier than Vancouver that same day. For the rest of the week, shivering locals greeted us with these words: “Buenos días. Mucho frío!”

The climate frontline

Cuba’s per-person CO2 emissions are only about half the global average. Despite this minimal footprint, it sits on the frontlines of climate change. Its mangrove coastlines are a “blue” carbon sink—one of the top three in the world, and a natural gift to humanity—but they are increasingly vulnerable. To make matters worse, Cuba is in the midst of a severe energy crisis driven by aging thermal electric plants, the economic downturn since the pandemic, and the growing difficulty of importing fuel for power generators, vehicles, and farm machinery. This strain has only intensified as the United States tightened a decades old economic embargo and, after its intervention in Venezuela, effectively choked off the flow of oil that Cuba has long relied on. This has deepened fuel shortages and pushed the already fragile grid toward collapse.

That made our bus tour around central Cuba an adventure in finding enough diesel to complete the itinerary. But complete it we did, with help from Cuban friends who had access to the unofficial market.

From small gritty plots with well-tended rows of vegetables, to more spacious wooded spreads with ponds, cattle, and meadows, we were warmly, and gratefully, welcomed everywhere. Besides the urgent problem of the darkened electricity grid, we heard story after story about how extreme weather is becoming the new normal—summer days too hot for field work, torrential rains, longer, harsher dry spells, and ferocious hurricanes, like Melissa last October, the third-most intense Atlantic cyclone on record.

Our new friends Virginia and César, having travelled 12 hours by bus from their farm in eastern Cuba to visit our group, described the agony of watching years of work vanish in a few hours. We heard about declining water tables due to drought, and increasing salt in the soil due to rising sea levels. Crops like guava shrivel from longer dry spells, while tomatoes drown in rains heavier than the elders have ever seen. One farmer, Abel González, showed us a greenhouse shredded by a tornado—the first he had ever experienced.

The challenges are relentless: unpredictable seasons that turn crop planning into a gamble, emerging insect pests, and a power grid so unstable that irrigation pumps often fail when they are needed most. Most urgently, rising sea levels threaten to submerge 10 percent of Cuba by the end of the century. According to........

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