What is the best way to recover the Caribbean beaches?
– The measures for confronting erosion are not always carried out with scientific rigor: the usual solutions are copied — like the construction of jetties –, which are successful in continental zones, but not always ideal in our situation. Sometimes the measures respond to interests of isolated landowners and not to an environmental program. Among the most-used alternatives is artificial supply, returning to the beach in a short time the sand that it lost over years. But beforehand, studies must be conducted to locate the appropriate site for extraction, often in the same sandbank that was formed with the lost sand. That is what was done in the south of the U.S. state of Florida, where beaches received around 100 million cubic meters of sand in the 1970s and 1980s. And also in the Cuban resort of Varadero (east of Havana), where since 1998 more than one million cubic meters of sand has been dumped. – What is the outlook for the Caribbean? – If the Caribbean beaches are not protected
