By Ed Augustin and Frances Robles of the San Juan Daily Star

Roger García Ordaz makes no secret of his many attempts to flee.
He has tried to leave Cuba 11 times on boats made of wood, Styrofoam and resin, and has a tattoo for each failed attempt, including three boat mishaps and eight times picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and sent home.
Hundreds of homemade, rickety boats have left this year from the shores of Baracoa, a fishing village west of Havana where García, 34, lives -- so many that locals call the town “Terminal Three.”

“Of course I am going to keep on throwing myself into the sea until I get there,” he said. “Or if the sea wants to take my life, so be it.”

Living conditions in Cuba under Communist rule have long been precarious, but today, deepening poverty and hopelessness have set off the largest exodus from the Caribbean island nation since Fidel Castro rose to power over a half-century ago.
The country has been hit by a one-two punch of tighter U.S. sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic, which eviscerated one of Cuba’s lifelines -- the tourism industry. Food has become even more scarce and more expensive, lines at pharmacies with scant supplies begin before dawn and millions of people endure daily hourslong blackouts.

Over the past year, nearly 250,000 Cubans, more than 2% of the island’s 11 million population, have migrated to the United States, most of them arriving at the southern border by land, according to U.S. government data.
Even for a nation known for mass exodus, the current wave is remarkable -- larger than the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis combined, until recently the island’s two biggest migration events.
But while those movements peaked within a year, experts say this migration, which they compare with a wartime exodus, has no end in sight and threatens the stability of a country that already has one of the hemisphere’s oldest populations.

The avalanche of Cubans leaving has also become a challenge for the United States. Now one of the highest sources of migrants after Mexico, Cuba has become a top contributor to the crush of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border, which has been a major political liability for President Joe Biden and which the administration considers a serious national security issue.
“The numbers for Cuba are historic, and everybody recognizes that,” said a senior State Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. “That said, more people are migrating globally now than they ever have been and that trend is certainly bearing out in our hemisphere, too.”

Many experts say that U.S. policy toward the island is helping fuel the very migration crisis that the administration is now struggling to address.
To appeal to Cuban American voters in South Florida, the Trump administration discarded President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement, which included restoring diplomatic relations and increasing travel to the island. President Donald Trump replaced it with a “maximum pressure” campaign that ratcheted up sanctions and severely limited how much cash Cubans could receive from their families in the United States, a key source of revenue.

“This is not rocket science: If you devastate a country 90 miles from your border with sanctions, people will come to your border in search of economic opportunity,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama and was the point person on talks with Cuba.
While any significant rollback of sanctions remains off the table, the two governments are engaged in efforts to address the extraordinary migration surge.

Washington recently announced that it would restart consular services in Havana in January and issue at least 20,000 visas to Cubans next year in line with long-standing agreements between the two nations, which officials hope will dissuade some people from trying to make dangerous journeys to the United States.
Havana has agreed to resume accepting flights from the United States of Cubans who are deported, another move to try to discourage migration. The Biden administration has also reversed the cap on money that Cuban Americans are allowed to send to relatives and licensed a U.S. company to process the wire transfers to Cuba.

Cuba’s free fall has been accelerated by the pandemic: Over the past three years, Cuba’s financial reserves have dwindled, and it has struggled to stock shore shelves. Imports -- largely food and fuel -- have dropped by half. The situation is so dire that the government electric company boasted this month that electrical service had run uninterrupted that day for 13 hours and 13 minutes.
Last year, fed up by the economic decline and a lack of freedom compounded by a COVID-19 lockdown, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets in the biggest anti-government protests in decades. A crackdown followed, with nearly 700 people still imprisoned, according to a Cuban human rights group.
Cubans of fewer means try to leave by building makeshift boats, and at least 100 have died at sea since 2020, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard has intercepted nearly 3,000 Cubans at sea in the past two months alone.

But these days most Cuban migrants fly off the island, with relatives abroad often paying the airfare, followed by a tough overland journey. (Cuba lifted an exit visa requirement to leave by air a decade ago, although it is still illegal to leave by sea.)
The floodgates opened last year, when Nicaragua stopped requiring an entrance visa for Cubans. Tens of thousands of people sold their homes and belongings and flew to Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, paying smugglers to help them make the 1,700-mile journey by land to the U.S. border.

Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York who is on sabbatical on the island, noted that the soaring migration figures do not account for the thousands who have left for other countries, including Serbia and Russia.
“This is the biggest quantitative and qualitative brain drain this country has ever had since the revolution,” she said. “It’s the best and the brightest and the ones with the most energy.”
The departure of many younger, working-age Cubans augurs a bleak demographic future for a country where the average life expectancy of 78 is higher than for the rest of the region, experts said. The government already can barely afford the meager pensions the country’s older population relies on.

The hemorrhaging of Cubans from their homeland is nothing short of “devastating,” said Elaine Acosta González, a research associate at Florida International University. “Cuba is depopulating.”
Just a few years ago, the country’s future seemed far different. With the Obama administration loosening restrictions on travel to Cuba, American tourists pumped dollars into the island’s fledgling private sector.

Now, travel is again severely limited, and years of economic downturn have for many Cubans extinguished the last embers of optimism.
Joan Cruz Méndez, a taxi driver who has tried to leave three times, looked out to the sea in Baracoa and explained why so many boats that once lined the town’s shores are gone, along with their owners.

“The last thing you can lose is hope, and I think a large part of the population has lost hope,” said Cruz, recounting how he had once made it out 30 miles to sea only to be forced to turn back, because too many people onboard got seasick and vomited.
In March, Cruz, 41, bought a plane ticket for his wife to fly to Panama and tapped his savings to pay a smuggler $6,000 to get her to the United States, where she claimed political asylum. She is working at an auto parts store in Houston.

In the woods just beyond the town, people were busy building more boats, stripping motors from cars, electric generators and lawn mowers.
When the sea is calm, they wait for the local Cuban coast guard contingent to clock off its shift, before carrying the makeshift vessels on their shoulders through town and over craggy rocks before lowering them gently into the water.

In May, Yoel Taureaux Duvergel, 32, and his wife, Yanari, who was five months pregnant with their only child, and four others set out in the wee hours. But their motor broke. They started rowing, but were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard just a few miles from the United States and taken back to Cuba, where Taureaux tries to get by doing odd jobs.
Asked why he had tried to leave, he laughed. “What do you mean why did I want to leave?” he said. “Don’t you live in the Cuban reality?”
He intends to try again. “Once you start, you can’t stop,” he said.

Sitting beside him, Maikol Manuel Infanta Silva, 19, had sold his family’s refrigerator to build a boat that sank. He, too, will try again.
By law, he is supposed to be serving in the military, but he fled and tries to make a living catching fish with a harpoon.

In Cuba, he said, “everything keeps getting worse.”

Wow what a superb image - another absolute cracker taken by Yadiel Veunes Alonso recently at Ciénega de Zapata. Fernandina's Flicker is a species of woodpecker and is endemic to Cuba. It is thought that the population may now be down to around just 200 pairs. Never common, it was once more widespread across the island but is now restricted to just five isolated populations, with the Zapata area holding the largest at about 120 pairs. It is now one of the rarest woodpeckers in the World. It's natural habitats include dry forests, dry savanna, swamps, and pastures and it's thought that the main reasons for the decline are loss of habitat due to logging and hurricanes bringing down their nesting trees. 

They often forage on the ground, primarily for ants, but also for other insects, worms, grubs and seeds. Fernandina's Flicker breeds between March and June, and during courtship, pairs regularly engage in high-flying chases.

Like all woodpeckers, it is a cavity nester. Recent fieldwork has shown that it prefers to use nest holes started by West Indian Woodpeckers; the Flicker usurps the original owners, finishes off the excavation work, and moves in. The female lays a clutch of three to five white eggs which are incubated for a period of about 18 days. The young fledge after 22 days. But the West Indian Woodpeckers sometimes get their own back and have been observed killing the chicks of Fernandina's Flickers.

A big thank you to Yadiel Veunes Alonso for allowing me to use his fabulous picture.

Moth-trapping overnight produced a few species of moths and a nice Cicada species. I'm not sure what its called yet but we haven't seen it before. In 2009 Alan F Sanborn from Barry University, Florida published the 'Checklist, new species and key to the cicadas of Cuba (Hemiptera, Cicadoidea, Cicadidae)'. I've emailed him asking for a copy of the paper so I'm hoping I will be able to identify it then. A total of 12 species, five genera, four tribes, and two subfamilies comprise the Cuban cicada fauna.
Of the moths, the pyrale Lygropia tripunctata was a new species for me and Carathis gortynoides was also new. Rayner had provided me with a photo of the very similar species Carathis alayorum ages ago but I had not seen either myself before.

We gave our driver Duviel a day off today so he went back to Habana last night, and we then spent the day exploring the hotel gardens and local area. First off with the reptiles: the two commonest species seemed to be the Cuban White-fanned Anole Anolis homolechis and the Cuban Brown Anole Anolis sagrei. Females and youngsters of the former have a rufous colouring to the head and have a pale dorsal line down the back.

Later as we were watching for the Tailed Cecropians, Doug spotted a large anole on a mango sitting high up in one of the trees. It is the endemic Western Giant Anole Anolis luteogularis which is only found west of Zapata and on the Isle of Youth. This is another species that I had wanted to see here and was part of the reason for staying here for several days.

On our previous stays we have never seen the Antillean Palm Swifts that nest here in the thatch of the bar next to the large swimming pool. but this time they were very obvious going in and out of their nests

On the north side of the hotel grounds there was a rough flowery area with lots of butterflies

There were lots of Cuban Crescent Anthanassa frisia and Phaon Crescent Phyciodes phaon and our first Polydamas Swallowtails Battus polydamas.

The calls of the endemic Cuba Trogon were almost constant and a small party of Smooth-billed Anis were were working through the freshly turned plot below the pool bar.

From the bridge overlooking the river we saw Fulvous Hairstreak Electrostrymon angelia and Doug then spotted the feeding damage of Mosaic Colobura dirce on a small Cecropian tree just below us next to the water.

A female Sleepy Orange Abaeis nicippe was flying up and down the track looking for small Senna plants on which to lay its  eggs and a Queen Danaus gilippus larva was hiding under a Asclepias curassavica leaf.

We couldn't keep away. Now that flights to Cuba are again starting up from Europe and tourists are again starting to travel now that the worst effects of the pandemic are starting to decline due to the vaccination programs we thought we'd return with the primary objective of trying to find the Great King Anetia pantherata. We arrived in Habana last night after traveling from London via Madrid. Gone are the direct flights from London by Thomas Cook or Virgin so it was Air Europa via Madrid. We stayed as we have in the past at the Copacabana Hotel in the centre of Habana with swimming in the sea pool outside our windows.
Some things had changed, not least the roofs of parts of the hotel, which on our last visit had been clay pantiles in need of repair where many Cuban Martins nested where the pantiles had blown off. These had now all been removed and in their place was now just a pantile colour painted concrete roof. The many Cuban Martins that nested here on the two roofs in the first picture had now all been displaced. Luckily there were still a few pairs nesting under the imitation pantile sheet roofing on the side of the building just above our room. So before breakfast I spent half an hour trying to get a few pictures in the rather poor early morning light.

Our driver Duviel picked us up after breakfast, and as Doug and Yosiel had been a bit delayed, we went off with Duviel to the edge of Habana to get an oil change on the vehicle. While that was being done Lynn and I walked down the road to find some butterflies. There were several yellows, Ceraunus Blue Hemiargus ceraunus, both Phaon Crescent Phyciodes phaon and Cuban Crescent Anthanassa frisia. Cuban Calisto Calisto herophile and one or two skippers including Baracoa Skipper Polites baracoa and this Cuban Broken-dash Wallengrenia misera. This is a species that we see more often in woodland clearings rather than on roadside verges.

I should say at the start, that back in 2019, just before our whale-watching trip to Mexico, I had traded in my Canon DSLR for a Sony RX10 bridge camera. The Sony has some great advantages like a zoom lens up to 600mm, great image stabilisation, the image quality is not quite as sharp as I'd like it to be but its the speed of focusing that is a problem to me. Often the time it takes to find the bird or butterfly on the screen and to focus means that the target is long gone.
So we picked up Douglas and Yosiel and then headed off to Soroa where we were going to be staying at the Hotel Horizontes Villa Soroa for four nights. At the Reception as we were booking in we were told that the Hotel Maria La Gorda at Guanahacabibes, which was our next hotel, had just been closed due to power cut problems and we'd need to make other arrangements. Such is Cuba! Time for a quick photo of this Pyralid moth before off to our rooms.

We put our things in our rooms, quick wash and change and out to look for wildlife. There is a small strip of cultivated land just behind the hotel which is always good for butterflies and first was finding a Costus spiralis plant covered in the eggs of Perching Saliana - Saliana esperi. There was also a large larva too. Many of the tips of the leaves had an egg, or in the case below, two - of which one had already hatched.

And there was a pretty orchid that we hadn't seen before called Prosthechea boothiana. It is supposed to be widespread from the coast up to 200m asl but here at Soroa the altitude is around 225m asl.

On the edge of a small cultivated strip behind the hotel Doug spotted a small Scaly-breasted Mannikin which allowed a remarkably close approach and remained motionless near the ground apart from the occasional blinking of the eye.

There were lots of butterflies on the flowers of the weedy plot and we saw around twenty species in about an hour. A pair of Common Ground Dove were feeding on the freshly turned ground where the hand-driven oxen had passed with the plough and Doug and Yosiel found a Spanish Flag Anole Anolis allogus on a tree at the end of the plot.

Just below the bar area there was a short row of Mango trees  with some fallen fruits on the ground which were attracting 5 or 6 Tailed Cecropian Historis acheronta and on a ripe fruit high up in one of the trees.

Of the butterflies on the flowers there were six Ocola Skipper Panoquina ocola, two Purple-washed Skipper Panoquina lucas and later a pair of Cuban Crescent Anthanassa frisia in cop and a Cloudless Sulphur Phoebis sennae and several Dainty Sulphur Nathalis iole settling to roost in the grasses before it was time to go in for our evening meal.

The Cuban Grassquit is a declining endemic bird of Cuba. It suffers mainly due to the unchecked captive bird trade where where wild birds are trapped and then kept in small cages for the rest of their lives - for human pleasure. Their capture is illegal but the authorities turn a blind eye as life is very hard anyway for most of the human population. Thank you to Jorge Juria for the wonderful photo.

The range of the Nassau Grouper covers the whole of the Caribbean including Florida and down to Venezuela and the coast of Belize. It is found on inshore coral reefs and down to a depth of 100m. Its range has declined catastrophically due to commercial over-fishing including on Cuba so that in many areas it is now considered extinct.
It is a solitary fish (except when spawning), feeding in the daytime, mainly on other fish and small crustaceans such as crabs and small lobsters. It spawns in December and January, always around the time of the full moon, and always in the same locations. By the light of the full moon, huge numbers of the grouper cluster together to mate in a mass spawning.
Cuba is at last setting up Marine Protected Areas to ensure that adults can spawn and the young grow in safety. Cuba does not have a great track record in nature conservation. In fact one only has to look at huge illegal bird trapping business in Cuba to see what happens. Yes there are laws in place to prevent such bird trapping for the cage bird trade but it still goes on often under the noses of the police who take no action whatever. And so in the dismal and deteriorating economic climate in the country the regime allows it to continue and takes no action to stop it. And many of the birds collected and consigned to living in tiny cages for the rest of their lives are rare and declining endemics like Cuban Parrot, Cuban Grassquit and Cuban Bullfinch.

Protection of marine life such as turtles and manatees I think follows much the same pattern though at least for the turtles there are some great protection efforts going on mainly by volunteers. We saw this on our latest trip to Cuba in August and I'll be writing about this later. The MPA set up to protect the Grouper, and where the wonderful pictures above were taken by Joán Hernandez Albernas is at Cayo Francés (marked below) which lies to the west of Cayo Coco on the central north coast of Cuba. It was here also that a carcass of a stranded Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus) was discovered on Feb 6th 2022. It was determined as a young male 13m long and you can read about the finding here. This stranding is the first record for the species in the
northern coast of Cuba, and the second documented in the country. Fin Whales are the second longest whale on the planet (after the Blue Whale) and can grow to around 26m in length.

I've often thought there is huge potential for whale watching in Cuba especially in the south-east where the land drops away rapidly to deep water. In other parts of the world these are typically areas where upwellings from the deep create ideal conditions for cetaceans to feed. Anywhere west of Santiago de Cuba could be brilliant I think but I don't expect anyone has ever looked. I would love to go back to Cuba and spend time in this area just looking out to sea with a telescope or binoculars. Whether we will or nor remains to be seen.

The fear that the Cuban  regime has of a mass exodus of Cuban folk, to Florida especially, means that ownership of fast boats is restricted. And of course the Guardian newspaper here in the UK reported only yesterday the Cuba state media report that a boat off northern Cuba traveling toward the United States sank after a collision with a Cuban coastguard ship and at least five people died. The craft reportedly flipped over after the crash near Bahía Honda, about two hours from the capital, Havana. Among the five known dead were a minor and three women, while 23 people were rescued. No other details have been released and the true facts will probably never be known. Cuban authorities say the matter is now under investigation but it should be born in mind that the narrative they wish to promote is that the journey is very dangerous and is likely to result in them being caught and returned to Cuba. Who knows what the fate of the survivors will be but it will likely involve a long prison sentence incarcerated in a Cuban jail as a deterrent to others. The incident comes amid the biggest migratory flight from the Caribbean island in four decades, spurred by a deepening economic, political and energy crisis. The majority of Cubans leaving go by plane to Nicaragua, then travel overland to the US border, often in Texas and Arizona.
But a growing number have fled by boat on the dangerous 90-mile (145km) journey to the southern coast of the United States. Between October 2021 and August 2022, the US Coast Guard intercepted more than 4,600 Cubans traveling by boat, almost six times more than in all of 2020. It is the largest exodus since 1980, when about 125,000 Cubans traveled by sea to the US over six months, an event known as the Mariel crisis.

And I haven't said that since the last corrupt, lying, cheating charlatan.

Who'd vote Tory? Still at least there's only two more Chancellors till Christmas. Have a good one - if you can still afford it that is. There are now over 2,500 food banks operating in the UK and they provided over 2.1 million food parcels to those suffering hardship in the year to May 2022. Most are employed hard-working people, some doing two or more jobs trying to make ends meet and feed their families. We need a General Election and a new Government now. We need rid of all corrupt, lying Tory politicians.

Or, as the wonderful actress Miriam Margolyes said live on Radio 4 this morning while talking about Jeremy Hunt "Fuck the Tories".

While we were in Cuba in August we went to visit Carlos A. Mancina in Habana. He is Director of the Institute of Ecology and Systematics in Habana. On the wall of their flat was this wonderful painting of a Cuban Giant Owl. No you won't find it in the Field Guide as it is long extinct. It was painted by his good friend Raimundo Lopez-Silvero in 2020.

Carlos had generously retained some copies of a new book published earlier this year (for which he is the lead author) called Mariposas de Cuba, Guía de Campo. Douglas Fernandez had written a chapter and I had also contributed a little. This is the first Field Guide to be written on the Butterflies of Cuba and although a few hard copies were printed the main advantage of the book is that it is available as a free pdf. It was produced with the purpose of raising awareness and as a leaning aid for the population of Cuba.

But - back to the Owl. The Cuban Giant Owl or Giant Cursorial Owl is an extinct genus of giant owl that measured around 1.1 metres in height. It is closely related to the many species of living owls of the genus Strix. It was a flightless or nearly flightless bird, and therefore largely terrestrial,  and is believed to be the largest owl that has ever existed. It lived solely on the island of Cuba.

The first fossil specimen was mistakenly described as a bird in the family Phorusrhacidae, in part because the bones were so large. Birds in this family, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorous flightless birds that were one of the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era; their conventionally accepted temporal range covers from 62 to 0.1 million years (Ma) ago.  In 1961, Pierce Brodkorb reviewed the fossil remains and placed them properly, with the owls. Remains have been found to be abundant throughout the island, in cave deposits from the Late Pleistocene period (126,000 to 11,700 years ago) and at least three nearly complete skeletons have been found.

Arredondo estimated the height of Ornimegalonyx to have been 1.1 metres tall and it probably easily exceeded 9 kilograms. It had very long legs for its size, but was bulky overall and probably short-tailed. The modern-day owl that most resembles the Cuban Giant Owl in proportions is probably the small long-legged Burrowing Owl which is found throughout the open landscapes of North and South America. It is the only surviving owl that is very largely terrestrial. This implies similar adaptations to the terrestrial lifestyle, but not a close phylogenetic relationship.

One of the largest living owls, the Eurasian eagle owl (Bubo bubo), reaches 4 kg in weight, and Peters has reported them taking roe deer fawns that weigh 17 kg as prey. The legs and feet of the Cuban Giant Owl also appear to be very large and powerful. This supports the theory that they were strong runners, hence the alternative name, cursorial. The keel of the sternum was reduced and the owl may have been capable of a short burst of flight.
The Cuban Giant Owl is believed to have preyed principally on large Jutias (still extant today), including Capromys, Geocapromys, and Macrocapromys (the latter being the size of a modern capybara) and the ground sloths Cubanocnus, Miocnus, Mesocnus, and Megalocnus. It was probably an ambush predator that would pounce on unsuspecting prey with its crushing talons.

We are living in very dangerous times with Neoliberalism and fascism on the rise. Do watch what George Monbiot has to say about this here.