Like the rest of the Caribbean, Cuba is suffering from longer droughts, warmer waters, more intense storms and higher sea levels due to climate change.

The rainy season has become longer and wetter.

This lowers the agricultural productivity of Cuba, which is already burdened by the US embargo and an unproductive, state-controlled economy, BTA reports.

"We're producing a lot less because of the weather," said Jordan Diaz Gonzalez, whose production of black beans, a staple of the Cuban diet and its most profitable crop, has dropped by 70 percent, he says, because of climate change.

A month after Hurricane Ian hit Cuba, Díaz began growing malanga root, a Cuban staple that is more resilient to climate change but less profitable than beans.

68 are already the victims of Hurricane Ian

Agriculture has long been a relatively successful part of Cuba's struggling economy.

The socialist government had a relatively liberal attitude toward food producers, allowing them to pursue their economic interests more openly than other entrepreneurs in Cuba.

Cuba has enough sun, water and soil, the basic ingredients needed to grow plants and feed animals.

By changing the way nature works in the Caribbean, however, climate change is disrupting key elements of productivity.

When Ian hit Batabano, about an hour south of Havana, it flooded the home of fisherman Orbelis Silega and destroyed his refrigerator and television.

Silega was already in a difficult financial situation due to reduced fish stocks.

Rising global temperatures are devastating coral reefs, which are vital marine ecosystems.

"This city without fish is nothing," Silega says.

 Ian, a Category 3 hurricane, devastated western Cuba in late September, killing three people, destroying 14,000 homes, damaging the power grid and destroying the country's most valuable tobacco fields.

Cuba was already in one of its worst economic, political and energy crises in decades because of the coronavirus pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine, among other factors.

The number of Cubans leaving the country is the highest in decades, with U.S. authorities intercepting nearly 221,000 Cubans at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022. That's a 471 percent increase over the previous year, according to Customs and Border Protection. of the USA.

As with everything in Cuba, behind the immigration flow is a complex combination of internal political and economic governance and relations with the US and other countries.

Part of what's driving that flow is climate change, which cost Cuba $65.85 billion in gross domestic product between 1990 and 2014 alone, or 9 percent of its total GDP, according to Dartmouth College.

"Caribbean economies, tourism, agriculture and fishing are on the front lines" of vulnerability to climate change, notes Donovan Campbell, a climate change expert at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

Cuba has pledged to get nearly a quarter of its energy from renewable sources by 2030. But so far, the country produces little more than 5 percent of its energy from renewable sources and is still dependent on oil from allies Venezuela and Russia.

The US trade embargo "impedes our access to the resources that we could have and would allow us to recover from these events as quickly as possible," commented Adianez Taboada, deputy minister of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment of Cuba.

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Agriculture