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I had never known a trip to
garner such demand. Every
year we organize a couple of
photo tours to distant and
exotic destinations in the
tropical diving universe. This
year we arranged our first trip
to Cuba — to the
Jardines de la
Reina
(Gardens of the Queen)
— and it sold out in only two
hours. I’ve heard of similar
success from others in the dive
travel business, too. There was
tremendous pent-up demand
for Cuba, it seemed, among
North American divers. This
was curious to me, because
I’d dived Cuba before and was
underwhelmed.
UNDERWHELMED?
“Underwhelming” is not a
word you typically see used
to describe diving in Cuba,
but context is important to
understand my experiential
baseline. In the mid-1980s a popular strobe manufacturer
of the day, Subsea, invited me and several other
professional underwater photographers to teach a
seminar to their best dive shop retailers, destination
Cuba. We traveled to the Isle of Youth and enjoyed some
relatively good diving on its walls and shipwrecks. The
scenery was nice, especially the huge sponges against
blue water backgrounds, but I was struck by how few
fish I was seeing. This makes sense when you consider
that the Isle of Youth is the seventh-largest island in the
West Indies and has a population of 86,000. That many
people can consume a lot of fish, so it’s no surprise the
fishing pressure was discernible. This was 30 years ago,
and Cuba’s initiative to develop marine protected areas
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FALL 2016
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