Integrated Coastal Management in Cuba: Progress and Challenges in the 2009-2019 Stage

Abstract

Regional efforts jointly done for synthesizing the situation about Integrated Coastal Management and Public Politics in Iberoamerica started almost a decade ago. Ten years later, the present Chapter is aimed to analyze advances regarding implementation of integrated coastal management in Cuba. Due to its condition of being a Caribbean archipelago, everything in Cuba is strongly linked to its coastal and marine characteristics; issues about integrated coastal zone management have received greater attention, becoming, at present, an item of maximum priority among the political and legal frameworks of the country. Improvement to the political-normative framework regarding integrated coastal management, increase in the number of institutions devoted to assess themes related to that topic, as well as in the number of projects, activities for Postgraduate formation and communitarian education regarding the topic, are all widely shown in the present Chapter. Approval and implementation of the National Plan for Social and Economic Development up to 2030 (NPSED, 2030), and of the State Plan to face the Climate Change (“Life Task” in Sp. “Tarea Vida”) have been irrelevant for the country. Both Plans are aimed to analyze typical problems of the coastal zone, focusing on the search of solutions. New challenges for coastal zone management in Cuba are also described in the present Chapter, where possibilities of putting into practice new actions, as well as items, which require deeper analysis, are also given.