Managing marine recreational fisheries in Cuba for sustainability and economic development with emphasis on the tourism sector

Through effective management, recreational fisheries can engender economic development, while maintaining stock productivity and ecosystem health. Despite good potential for developing a strong recreational fishery in Cuba, we found poor performance in this sector, resulting from gaps in governance (i.e., regulating laws and institutions), lack of infrastructure, poor communication strategy, and general public misunderstanding. We evaluated the existing governance system against best practices from the literature, described the current Cuban context, and offered 10 non-prioritized recommendations to ensure alignment with national goals for improving food security, livelihoods and ecosystem health: (1) consider vulnerable target species when developing data collection systems; (2) estimate potential social, ecological and economic impacts of management scenarios; (3) evaluate the demand for recreational fishing; (4) clarify goals in statute; (5) create an implementation strategy that recognizes barriers and offers mitigation tactics; (6) develop a data collection and research program to monitor stock and ecosystem status, as well as performance against fishery goals; (7) develop a cost-recovery strategy to fund data collection, fisheries management and enforcement; (8) increase institutional support of recreational fisheries; (9) integrate private stakeholders in the recreational sector; and (10) implement sound communication strategies.