From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba
An Environmental History Since 1492
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2772952 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Myrna Santiago (0000-0002-4701-3445, Saint Mary's College of California, corresponding author), Myrna I Santiago (Saint Mary's College of California) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 89 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 544-545 |
| Publication date | 2009-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Hispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00182168-2009-031 |
| OpenAlex | W1965753616 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Reinaldo Funes Monzote has written a seminal book on the environmental history of sugar in Cuba. Written as a chronicle of the changes that the sugar plantation complex wrought upon the largest of the islands in the Antilles, the text is reminiscent of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the 1981 novel by Gabriel García Márquez that describes an assassination that everyone knew was going to take place but became inevitable nonetheless. The demise in this case was of Cuba’s tropical rainforest.There are no innocents in this sad story about the replacement of the island’s rain-forest by sugar cane. Yet the book is not a lamentation but a serious analysis of how competing interests maneuvered and sparred throughout the colonial period over possession and use of the forests. The Royal Navy and the sugar planters were the main protagonists interested in forests after the demographic collapse of indigenous peoples brought about by Spanish conquest. Both sought to convince the Crown that their use of the forest was best for the colony and the empire. The book raises questions still pertinent to Cuba and Latin America today: In matters of natural resources, should private property or state control prevail? Who represents the public interest best: individuals or the state? What is the proper role for the state in resource management? Who is more likely to protect natural resources?If the history of Cuban forests is a guide, answers to these questions will be hard-fought, a complex mix of political muscle, changing ideological constructs, technology, capital flows, and global economics. Those are the factors Funes Monzote selects in order to demonstrate convincingly that the turning point for the Cuban rainforest came in the late eighteenth century, when a perfect storm of circumstances beyond the island convinced the Spanish monarchy to turn its back on the navy and support the planters’ Lockean theories about the superiority of private property to determine the fate of the island’s forests. That shift, in turn, meant private owners gained total freedom to deforest Cuba despite the navy’s heeding that deforestation would hurt the shipbuilding industry and change the climate. Funes Monzote identifies the following fateful combination of factors: the collapse of French rule in Haiti and the increase in demand for Cuban sugar; the arrival of the industrial revolution on the island in the shape of great sugar-producing centrales and steam-powered locomotives to move the sugar to market; and the Bourbon reforms liberalizing Cuban trade.The last of these allowed the United States to enter the picture as both investor and market for Cuba’s sugar industry. The potent mix of ideas, technology, and new actors meant that not even the bloody wars of independence in the mid and late nineteenth century stopped the advance of Big Sugar. Formal independence as a U.S. protectorate only accelerated the rate at which cane stalks replaced trees. By 1926, according to Funes Monzote, all land that could be blanketed in sugar was covered by the sweet grass. In a short 150 years, the rainforest had been turned into one vast cane field, leaving a mere 16.5 percent of the island still forested (p. 255). Cuban authorities now raised the alarm, as the results of massive deforestation became painfully obvious: loss of soil fertility, erosion, flooding, and loss of biodiversity, among others. Monocrop industrial agricultural production on that scale, Funes Monzote concludes, was truly akin to strip-mining in its environmental effects: it simplified ecosystems to an extreme degree, extracting more from the earth than it ever returned.Still, the text raises questions for this reader: why were labor and slavery not important in the argument? Also, Funes Monzote mentions that the transformation in the land had a significant impact on state formation but loses that narrative thread along the way. Surely the fact that Cuba’s plantation labor force was enslaved and then became free just at the moment that the pace of environmental change sped up must have been a factor in both the changes in the land and the process of state formation. If not, one wishes the author had noted it in this splendid example of the richness of Latin American environmental history
Casual · Colonialism · Demise · Economic history · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Latin Americans · Natural resource · Political science · Politics · Possession (linguistics) · State (computer science) · Cuban History and Society · Ecology · History · Law
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2021 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |