Conserving the Cuban croc was one of Fidel Castro\u2019s first priorities after he steamed into power in 1959. Just months into his rule, he ordered the creation of the Criadero de cocodrilos, Ci\u00e9naga de Zapata\u2014or Zapata Swamp Captive Breeding Facility\u2014a cluster of ponds, rows of concrete-block pens, and a couple of narrow one-story buildings split into modest offices and workspaces for staff two and a half hours south of Havana. Castro always had a predilection for wild spaces and things, says environmental historian Reinaldo Funes-Monzote of the University of Havana. Whether he cherished endemic species because they fit with his hypernationalistic sensibilities, or he related to their untamed energy, or he was just enlightened to the inherent value of wildlife is a guess, though crocodiles must have become a point of pride for him at some stage\u2014he eventually developed a habit of gifting them, either living or embalmed, to foreign allies. He also launched initiatives to raise manatees, deer, and Cuban gar in the swamp.<\/p>\n
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\nWorkers gather Cuban crocodile eggs from a breeding enclosure, setting aside a few that are no longer viable. The rest will be incubated in foam crates until hatchlings emerge. Photos by Shanna Baker<\/span><\/p>\n The island of Cuba, some say, is shaped like a crocodile, though you need a highly developed imagination to see it. The hatchery, located on one of its webbed feet\u2014whether front or back depends on which way you tilt your head\u2014has been solely dedicated to the conservation of the Cuban crocodile since 1974. The mission is straightforward in theory: secure the Cuban crocodile for the future and learn about the natural history of the little-understood species along the way. Yet as geneticist Yoamel Mili\u00e1n-Garc\u00eda of the University of Havana and others peer into the crocodile\u2019s cellular secrets, they\u2019re revealing that there\u2019s a lot more that needs to be considered when it comes to conserving Castro\u2019s croc.<\/p>\n In the wild, the Cuban\u2014one of the world\u2019s rarest crocodiles\u2014is found almost exclusively within the 300-square-kilometer freshwater interior of the Zapata Swamp. The saltier stretches along the coast are the domain of Cuba\u2019s other native crocodile\u2014the widely distributed American (Crocodylus acutus<\/em>), also found in coastal areas across Cuba and other Caribbean islands, and on the mainland from Mexico and southern Florida down to northern Peru and Venezuela. The Cuban is bolder and hunts during the day. It has a stubby snout, a reputation for jumping, and a tendency to walk with its belly high off the ground. The American is bigger, more apt to hide, searches for prey at night, sports dark bands on its back and sides, and has a long, pointed snout and extra webbing on its hind toes. The differences are as distinct as red from blue. Yet when Mili\u00e1n-Garc\u00eda analyzed their genetics a few years ago, he confirmed what zookeepers and scientists had already suspected: the two species are skinny-dipping in the same gene pool.<\/p>\n Both crocodiles have been subject to intense hunting pressure for decades. In the past, hunters generally sought skins or killed the animals out of fear. Now, poachers covet the meat, which is illegally and surreptitiously chopped, fried, and plated at private restaurants, primarily for tourists seeking a brag-worthy culinary exploit. As American crocodiles flee poachers on the coast, they push deeper into the swamp, where they\u2019re more likely to mingle with Cubans.<\/p>\n Illustration by Mark Garrison<\/p><\/div>\n Mili\u00e1n-Garc\u00eda\u2019s research shows that perhaps one out of every two crocodiles in the Zapata Swamp is a hybrid. And he found that 16 percent of the breeding animals at the captive facility were hybrids, likely a legacy of the facility\u2019s early days when American crocodiles were kept in the mix and the staff\u2014ex-hunters and locals without experience in animal husbandry\u2014weren\u2019t attuned to the possibility of hybridization.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople knew it was occurring, but not in that high of numbers,\u201d says Mili\u00e1n-Garc\u00eda. It\u2019s now considered one of the greatest threats to the Cuban crocodile, which has an estimated wild population of 3,000, with a gaping margin of error. At first, the findings were met with resistance, says Mili\u00e1n-Garc\u00eda. The research proved that crocodiles can\u2019t always be identified based on outward characteristics alone, as keepers had thought. Some hybrids pass for Cuban, some look and behave American.<\/p>\n Driven by their mandate, breeding facility staff plucked the hybrids out of their collection and destroyed them. That solved their immediate concern, but out in the wild, more hybrids were hatching every year, threatening the Cuban crocodile\u2019s lineage as evolution unfolds in real time.<\/p>\n Just down the road from the hatchery, I slide into a speedboat with Mili\u00e1n-Garc\u00eda, who has an easy smile and affable, laid-back demeanor, and hatchery biologist Etiam P\u00e9rez-Fleitas, with a sun-scorched complexion, rusty voice, and knack for cracking jokes even in stilted English (\u201cThe name of this place is Aeropuerto [airport],\u201d he quipped, referring to the crocodile enclosure, \u201cbecause sometimes when a female runs at you, you need to fly out fast like an airplane\u201d). The two scientists have known each other since high school and have been collaborating on crocodile research for years. Our driver steers with a growling outboard motor through searing midday light toward Laguna del Tesoro, or Treasure Lagoon. The lagoon is empty of Cuban crocodiles\u2014the local population was wiped out at the turn of the last century\u2014but P\u00e9rez-Fleitas likes to show visitors the habitat as a proxy for wild animals anyway; we can see the stage, but have to superimpose the actors with our minds. He points out the selling features that would appeal to a Cuban croc: a plump, football-sized snackable crab rambling into the foliage; a heron that might prey on juvenile crocodiles but would look like a kebab to an adult; a low bank with plenty of grass for nest mounds and soft mud for a female to bury eggs; tangles of lily pads and arcing mangrove roots where babies could hide out. Nearby, another boat shuttles tourists to a replica Indigenous village in the lagoon, which historian Lillian Guerra from the University of Florida says Castro designated a destination for \u201cgovernment elite and political rewardees\u201d in the 1970s and \u201980s. This was the companion piece to the crocodile center, part of the Boca de Guam\u00e1 ecotourism complex.<\/p>\n Geneticist Yoamel Mili\u00e1n-Garc\u00eda\u2019s work is helping peel back some of the mystery around Cuban crocodiles. Photo by Shanna Baker<\/p><\/div>\n By the time Castro had taken power, Zapata Swamp had already been altered by human ambition. Land reclamation projects here date back to the 19th century. And as researcher Claudia Mart\u00ednez Herrera from Cuba\u2019s national archive explains in a report, in the 1940s, the sugar industry arrived in the swamp\u2014trees were cleared to make way for crops and mills and to power production. Loggers also cut swaths of royal ebony, mahogany, and white oak for export and for coal production. The sediment released from logging changed the area\u2019s hydrology, causing four distinct areas to merge together into one giant swamp. Inhabitants drove artificial channels deep into the interior to access remaining trees. When Fulgencio Batista was in power, he had even taken steps to slash a canal all the way from the swamp\u2019s south coast to Havana, bisecting the country, as a shortcut for ships traveling between the United States and the Panama Canal, though it never materialized.<\/p>\n Castro embraced the notion of bringing economic development to the sparsely inhabited and impoverished region. In The Real Fidel Castro, <\/em>the late former British ambassador to Cuba Leycester Coltman says that from the beginning, the leader\u2014who has been heralded as an environmentalist\u2014\u201cshowed a fatal attraction to gigantic schemes to conquer nature and change the landscape, the sort of projects that appealed to other modern pharaohs such as Mussolini and Stalin.\u201d Castro wanted to drain the swamp, a \u201cvirtually unpopulated region, infested with mosquitoes and crocodiles,\u201d and convert it into \u201ca rich area for rice-growing and tourism,\u201d Coltman writes. Under his watch, Funes-Monzote confirms, more water was siphoned away and more artificial channels were driven deep into the swamp, into Cuban crocodile habitat.<\/p>\n Aspiring to save endemic species while simultaneously degrading their habitat is clearly contradictory, though awareness about the importance of saving ecosystems rather than focusing on specific species had not yet become part of the zeitgeist, and land reclamation was still generally viewed as a good idea, says Funes-Monzote. Plus, Castro was perfectly comfortable with contradictions, explains anthropologist Sabrina Doyon from Universit\u00e9 Laval in Quebec City. \u201cHe wanted everything at once and believed nothing was impossible, so I presume in his head both were not incompatible.\u201d<\/p>\n
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