Resolution of Respect Michel Faife Cabrera (1978–2021)

On August 14, 2021, the 42-year-old Cuban botanist, plant ecologist, and conservation biologist Michel Faife Cabrera died from complications of pneumonia following Covid. His sudden death came as a great shock to his many friends, students, and colleagues not only in Cuba but also in North and South America and Europe. Just 6 weeks earlier, Michel had given an outstanding, inspiring, and animated Zoom presentation in which he outlined his ambitious plans for continuing and expanding capacity building inside and outside of postpandemic academia. The enthusiastic audience, the largest ever recorded in that series of talks, came from all over Latin America.

Michel touched many lives in Cuba as a university professor, co-founder of the third undergraduate biology major in Cuba (the first in the center of the country), and co-founder of the country's first master's program in conservation biology, where he served as a coordinator for a year. He had international connections to many other scientists, reaching out to others with questions, data, observations, and friendship. He also touched just as many lives outside of formal academia—lives of schoolteachers and schoolchildren, park guards, peasant farmers, nature guides, museum guides, and many others. Michel had a great sense of humor and a tremendous passion for the biodiversity of his native country—to understand it, to spread his appreciation for the treasures of Cuban ecological systems, and to protect them. His loss leaves a gaping hole in university education and field research in conservation biology, plant ecology, and the ecology of plant-pollinator interactions in Cuba. Repairing that hole will be a tremendous challenge. The gaping hole that his absence leaves in building capacity in autonomous environmental science across Cuba, outside of academia, may prove to be impossible to fill.

Michel grew up in the province of Villa Clara, in central Cuba. Upon entering the career in biology at the Universidad de La Habana, Michel quickly took advantage of every opportunity to do field work, studying nesting sea turtles, and biodiversity of various groups in natural areas and semi-natural landscapes in the west of Cuba, participating in the selection of management guidelines for biodiversity conservation in the Sabana Camagüey ecosystem in central Cuba, and many other themes (Photo 1). In his sophomore year, the faculty placed him in a select group of honor students. His undergraduate thesis, derived from the work in the Sabana Camagüey project, dealt with the coastal vegetation complex on Cayo Santa María, Villa Clara. Michel graduated in 2002 with the Cuban equivalent of summa cum laude and was also awarded the prize of “most integrated student” for his great diversity of extracurricular activities.

Upon graduating from the University of La Habana, Michel returned to the Botanical Garden of Villa Clara, where he devoted himself to the working partnership between that institution and the Center for Environmental Studies and Services of the provincial government (Photo 2). His work involved field monitoring of subjects ranging from bird and plant populations to water quality and wastewater treatment. In 2004, he joined the agronomy faculty of the Universidad Central de Las Villas “Marta Abreu” and began teaching classes in ecology and botany. In 2006, thanks to the support of colleagues and an enlightened administration, he co-founded the biology department and major, where he continued as a professor and then full professor until his death.

Michel's postgraduate education included three degrees. In 2008, he received a master's degree in botany from the National Botanical Garden in La Habana. In 2011, he traveled to Spain for advanced studies, receiving a master's degree in Terrestrial Ecosystems, Sustainable Use, and Environmental Implications from the Universidad de Vigo, Spain. He was awarded a doctorate in biological sciences in 2014 from the same university, after which he returned to Cuba to continue his research and to develop an extensive teaching and outreach program.

In 2014, at a congress on the conservation of biological diversity in Cuba, Michael presented a talk on “Master's Program in Biodiversity Conservation: A New Proposal for Training Professionals.” The novel program, the first in Cuba, was—and remains—housed in the agronomy faculty of his university. Michel served as the head of the program's academic committee through the first wave of students and remained on the committee until August 2021. He also served as the program's coordinator for a year.

In spite of the tremendous investment of time and effort devoted to proposing and helping to develop two novel degree programs, Michel continued to spend as much time in the field as possible, now often accompanied by the many charged-up students who took his courses or whose theses he directed (nine undergraduate theses, five master's theses, and one doctorate thesis; Photo 3). As always, the research was diverse: restoration ecology, introduced species whether very invasive or not so much, conservation of endangered native vascular plants, serpentine vegetation, seed germination of wild plants, the ecology of plant–pollinator interactions, reproductive ecology of plants, and many other topics in botany and ecology. He was involved with and active in the international organization Planta! in Cuba, including botanical discovery, teaching, and outreach. He also succeeded in publishing 24 papers, almost all with students as co-authors or first authors. Many papers came out in Cuban journals, more easily accessible than foreign journals to Cuban students, while others came out in Plant Biology, Systematic Botany, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, Journal of Plant Research, Plant Biosystems, Animal Conservation, and the Revista Ibérica de Aracnología. From 2006 on, no relevant scientific meeting or congress took place in Cuba without at least one presentation by Michel and at least one by his students. Michel accomplished all of this while facing severe limitations on access to travel, supplies and equipment, the Internet, and international journals, working throughout his career under very limited personal and institutional financial restraints.

Other than those whose theses Michel directed, from where did all those students come? His courses. In 2004–2006, still on the agronomy faculty, Michel twice taught ecology and botany. When the biology major opened, Michel taught ecology and plant systematics every year, population ecology three times, and botany (2006–2007) or plant systematics (from 2008 on; Photo 4). In the master's program, each year from 2014 on, he taught one course in ecological interactions and another in population and community ecology.

This resolution of respect began with a reference to Michel's Zoom talk in June 2021. His plans for the postpandemic future included re-starting the annual summer field courses on research design, training teachers in schoolyard ecology throughout the rural schools in or near protected areas in Villa Clara, and workshops on “trails and tours of inquiry” in an international master's program in the Dominican Republic. Six weeks later all these dreams, certain to have become reality if Michel were still with us, dissipated.

Michel never paused. His insatiable curiosity, his intellectual brilliance, his drive, his humility, his good humor, his friendliness, and many other admirable traits never failed him. He never stopped working with that which he loved: ecology, plants, conservation, and people. Despite the logistic difficulties of accomplishing field research in Cuba, Michel continued to forge ahead until the end. His legacy includes a remarkable record of research and publications, two crucial academic programs that he co-founded in his own institution along with considerable contributions to other institutions, an inspired career in conservation and habitat restoration, and capacity building in and out of academia from one end to the other of Cuba. It also includes his many Cuban and international colleagues, friends, and students who miss him greatly.