More than any other country, Cuba has taken seriously the resolutions of the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio. The various elements of that program were not new. They were the outcome of more than 30 years of experimentation, innovation, and debate. Therefore, the improvement of life must emphasize quality of life, cultural development, education, and people taking care of people. Despite the popular adage, necessity is not a sufficient mother of invention.
Necessity can and often does lead to disaster.
There must also be the capacity to respond to necessity, the intellectual and material resources and the flexibility to use those resources. Rather, the emergency of 1989-93 allowed ecological thinking to come to the fore against developmentalist and narrowly economic thinking. But the process began long before that. I watched as botanists and zoologists began to think of themselves as ecologists and to examine the ecological consequences of development. By 1980, we had held the first national ecological conference in Cuba and passed a resolution urging the environment-monitoring agency, the National Commission for the Protection of the Environment and the Preservation of Natural Resources, also have regulatory powers.