A neighbor isolated. Archie maintained a meager correspondence with some increasingly lonesome scientists, but the chance to start a robust sea turtle program on that large island vanished in 1959. The proposal defies science and reason. There are scientists here tonight, friends to Cuba, who have, during the past few weeks run DNA tests on hawksbill turtles nesting at Tortuguero, Costa Rica. The haplotypes of some of these were the same as for samples taken from Cuban waters.
Cuban turtles are Costa Rican turtles.
Costa Rican turtles are Cuban turtles. It's a migratory species, a shared species. No one state has exclusive sovereignty over Eretmochelys imbricata, nor the right to impair its survival in our common waters. I hope that the entire hemisphere can unite on the mission of saving the hawksbill, allowing it to recover its unique role on the coral reefs of the Caribbean. For the sake of turtles, and for numerous other reasons, I hope that very early in this century the doors to Cuba will reopen, and that scientists from all over will be able to work together freely to address the plight of the hawksbill, and the panoply of other environmental perturbations that cloud our shared horizon.