CUBA’S ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
B. Ralph Barba and Amparo E. Avella
Environmental considerations were largely ignored
in Cuba for almost 200 years. Only in the last de-
cade, with the enactment of Law 33 on January 10,
1981, have environmental laws and regulations be-
gun to play a very small role in guiding the develop-
ment of natural resources exploitation and the ecolo-
gy of the island.
Law 33 is a very short document of only 25 pages. It
supposedly covers all the regulations from the “prin-
ciples of the Cuban Communist Party concerning
the environment,” to the protection and use of Cu-
ban national resources. Law 33 has a good dosage of
political “garbage,” including a section that compares
the “wise use of natural resources by communist
countries versus the indiscriminate use of natural re-
sources by the capitalistic world.”
BACKGROUND
As a guide for drafting Law 33, the Cuban Govern-
ment claims they relied on legislation enacted by
some former socialist countries such as the German
Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary and Russia.
In addition, they claim to have examined laws and
regulations from Colombia, Mexico, Sweden and
Venezuela together with materials from the United
Nations Program for the Environment, even though
it is known that some countries like Mexico had
practically no environmental laws at that time. It is
also common knowledge that the ecological situation
of Russia is a complete disaster; therefore, that coun-
try’s environmental laws were very lax or were never
applied.
The “Comisión Nacional de Protección del Medio
Ambiente y Conservación de los Recursos Naturales
(COMARNA)” was responsible for developing Law
33 and its regulations, but the Academy of Sciences
of Cuba was in charge of defining the technical ter-
minology included in the Law.
Thus, the Law on Environmental Protection and the
Rational Use of Natural Resources (Law 33) was
passed in order to “establish the basic principles to
conserve, protect, improve and transform the envi-
ronment and the rational use of natural resource