By Allison Griner From Jacksonville.com

After 18 months of secret diplomatic talks, the White House dropped a bombshell in December: relations with Cuba would start to be normalized.
In his speech, President Barack Obama announced that he plans to relax travel and trade restrictions imposed at the height of Cold War tensions in 1961. Those goals were furthered recently as the U.S. reopened its embassy in Havana.

Related: 3 Cuban species have already landed in Florida

But some critics, including Florida Gov. Rick Scott, worry that if restrictions are dropped completely, it won’t just be goods and tourists traveling between Cuba and the United States.

They believe that normalized relations with Cuba will bring an influx of nonnative and invasive species to Florida’s delicate ecosystems.

For centuries before the embargo, trade between Cuba and Florida flourished, allowing both plant and animal species to voyage back and forth. Some of the species, like the Cuban brown snail, are viewed mainly as nuisances. Others, like the Cuban tree frog, threaten Florida’s environmental well-being.

Florida is believed to have the largest invasive species problem in the nation, thanks to its pleasant climate and busy ports. Exotic pests imperil both its farms and parks. Of Florida’s shrinking natural areas, over 1.7 million acres are overrun by invasive pests.

And the effects are felt in the American pocketbook. A joint publication by the National Park Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimates that $500 million is spent each year to curb Florida’s invasion of foreign species. Of that sum, $50 million is dedicated just to uprooting exotic weeds.

But will normalized relations with Cuba actually increase Florida’s invasive problems?

As of right now, tourism and commerce with Cuba are still restricted to special circumstances. But the growing prospect that these remaining barriers will be dropped altogether has prompted politicians and interest groups to air their concerns.

In late April, Scott released a statement saying that “lifting the embargo on Cuba could do irreparable harm” to Florida’s agriculture. New imports from Cuba could “open our crops up to invasive pests and species,” he wrote.

The Florida Farm Bureau voiced its own concerns, not only that state-owned farms in Cuba would outcompete Florida farms, but that agricultural pests would arrive from Cuba and ravage Florida’s crops.

Janell Hendren, the bureau’s national affairs coordinator, never expected to lobby on the question of Cuban trade.

“We really weren’t expecting to fight this fight,” she said. “For decades, this wasn’t an issue. It was always on the backburner.”

But now, Hendren said, the issue has come to the forefront of her agenda. She believes that any legislation aimed at lifting the remnants of the embargo would have to be considered by Congress soon.

“This year, it may have more legs to lift the restriction on imports,” she said. “I doubt they would try to do that on a presidential election year.”

NOT JUST CUBAN SPECIES

The question of Cuban trade divides the Florida Farm Bureau from many of its counterparts, chief among them the American Farm Bureau Federation, which supports normalized relations. Where other farm groups see a new market for trade, the Florida Farm Bureau perceives the potential for unfair competition and risk.

Hendren has no problem with American products going to Cuba. She is much more concerned with what might be sent back.

“With Cuba specifically, one of the problems we have is that their infrastructure is a little on the antiquated side,” Hendren said. “That plays into how well they do or do not control their pests and invasive species in their own country.”

She points out that Florida’s southern tip has a climate and a soil similar to Cuba’s, and pests could easily make the transition from one place to the other. Diseases like greening and laurel wilt brought by invasive species can decimate Florida crops.

It’s not just Cuban species that might cause problems, Hendren said. It’s also species that have been brought to Cuba and become invasive there. Hendren points to the Marabou weed as an example. Originally from Africa, the weed has already overtaken a large swath of Cuba’s farmland.

“We really, almost literally, cannot be too careful,” she said.

John Capinera believes there certainly is the potential for species to migrate. As chairman for the University of Florida’s Department of Entomology and Nematology, he has researched invasive pests including insects and snails.

“The more international trade occurs, the more like it is that things will come into the country that aren’t here and will cause problems. Now, is Cuba particularly a threat to us? I don’t know,” he said. “Things move all around the world, all the time.”

HOPPING A RIDE

Some of that movement, however, is inevitable. Capinera points out the 90 miles of ocean separating Cuba from Key West isn’t a terribly long distance for a species to travel.

After all, organisms can float on debris across much larger bodies of water to colonize new places, or be blown great distances on the wind. One invasion in October 1988 illustrates that, Capinera said.

Panic descended upon the Caribbean when desert locusts from Africa started arriving in droves, carried across the ocean perhaps by a passing hurricane. But then, something odd happened. The invasion stopped. The locusts started to die.

“So there’s a lesson there. The environment has to be right for the organisms to survive. And not everything that gets to a place is going to make it,” said Capinera.

He notes that very little of Florida is actually tropical like Cuba.

“It may well be that many of the things that would be introduced from Cuba to Florida would find themselves in an unfavorable environment.”

Cuba and Florida already share a lot of species, both invasive and native to the Caribbean region, according to Tony Pernas, coordinator for National Park Service’s Florida and Caribbean Exotic Plant Management Team. Almost all of Florida’s 135 tropical tree species, he said, can be found elsewhere in the Caribbean, including Cuba.

Trade has been happening in the Caribbean for centuries before the embargo. Even before European colonization, the Taíno indigenous people would paddle canoes between Cuba and Florida, exchanging products and wildlife.

As a result, it can be difficult to tell what’s native and what’s not. Pernas said that’s the case with the Cuban bulrush, a grass-like sedge plant that can be aggressively invasive elsewhere in the U.S.

“That is a species that is, right now, in debate among botanists in Florida, whether it’s a natural introduction or whether it could clearly be classified [as invasive],” he said.

IT WORKS BOTH WAYS

Pernas’ colleague, Dennis Giardina of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, has been to Cuba four times over the past 2½ years, in part to teach about invasive species management. He believes that Cuba has much more to fear from exotic pests than Florida does, as relations between our two countries warm.

“Cuba, because of the revolution and the breaking of ties with the U.S. and many other countries, it’s almost like their international commerce in plants and animals stopped in the 1960s. So they’ve kind of been frozen in time,” he said. “So my opinion is, Cuba stands to receive more invasive species from us, than vice versa, if the floodgates are opened.”

Even Fidel Castro’s government was suspicious of foreign pests coming from the United States. In 1997, in the midst of the embargo, Cuba filed a complaint with the United Nations, accusing the U.S. of releasing the invasive insect known as melon thrips within its borders, though the allegation was never proved.

No matter which way the invasive species are traveling, Pernas and Giardina believe more can be done to stop the flow of invasive species. Shipping inspections are minimal. Reports indicate that 2 percent of live plants, and less than 2 percent of imported foods, are inspected upon arrival.

And once the invaders are here, there is little money to stop its spread.

“The federal government has a pot of money set aside for wildfires and for natural emergencies,” Pernas said. “However, the same thing is not true for invasive species.”

Pernas and Giardina hope that government agencies could adopt a more proactive approach to blocking invasive species from Cuba and around the world. They would like to see new screening procedures and a thorough risk analysis conducted before any new species, plant or animal, is brought to the U.S. for sale.

“I am hopeful that as time goes on we are going to get better and better at screening invasive species before they arrive,” Giardina said. “I just see so much technological advance even over the past couple of decades that I’m expecting us to continue and to improve. “

IMAGE: Photos by Allison Griner For the Times-Union
The Cuban tree frog, here in a PVC pipe that is used to trap them, has become an invasive species in Florida.
The brown anole lizard from Cuba had to compete with green Carolina anoles in Florida. We don’t see as many green lizards because the brown version got the upper hand.

For more on this story go to: http://jacksonville.com/news/2015-08-22/story/warming-cuba-relations-spurs-invasive-species-debate