SAVA Research Week V: Geotransformación / Panel on the Cuban Anthropocene

This panel considers the social and cultural transformations in revolutionary Cuba through the lens of the Socialist Anthropocene. Professor Reinaldo Funes Monzote from the University of Havana will share some of his extensive research into the environmental history of Cuba, focusing on divergent visions of the natural world from the 1960s to the present day. SAVA Research Fellow Sorcha Thomson will shed light on the ways in which Cuba engaged the world in its agrarian reform through Third World internationalism. Responses are by art historian Polly Savage, who has researched Africa’s Cold War visual art networks, and SAVA Research Fellow Jan Burek, who is deals with the environmental history of Poland in the socialist period.

Venceremos and Beyond: the Third World Internationalism of Cuba’s Agrarian Reform
Sorcha Thomson (SAVA UCL)

The process of agrarian transformation in the Cuban Revolution - from the passing of the 1959 law for the redistribution of land to the expansive projects of social and rural development that followed - changed the island and its socio-ecological relations. This presentation asks how Cuba presented this process to the world, and in doing so positioned itself within networks of third worldist and socialist inspiration and exchange. It does so by highlighting two avenues through which Cuba engaged the world in its agrarian reform: the publications that documented it (in particular the magazine of the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA), and the people invited to see it or be part of it. Looking beyond the better-documented Venceremos brigades from the USA who participated in 1970s sugar harvests, I point to the methodological potential of tracing the trajectories of those students, delegations and volunteers from Africa, Asia and Latin America who engaged in agrarian processes in Cuba, in order to better understand the third worldist internationalism that travels through Cuba and the socialist anthropocene.

Socialism and Environment in Cuba in Two Times. Divergent Visions in the Anthropocene
Reinaldo Funes Monzote (University of Havana)

In the debates on the environmental issue in socialist Cuba, two confronted visions characteristics of the Anthropocene dilemmas exist. One posits the destruction of the country because of the communist ideology of the Conquest of Nature. The other praises the creation of a new nature that made it possible to escape the social scourges of underdevelopment and preserve the environment from the voracity of capital. The reality is more complex than these divergent views. Still, both suffer from the lack of deeper evaluations of the country's environmental history in the global context, including its particularities in the former socialist countries and tropical developing countries. This presentation will offer a general overview of the socialist experience in Cuba and the environmental question, highlighting the differences between the two major stages. The first, from the revolution of 1959 to the fall of real socialism, was characterized by the rise of industrial agriculture and ideas about the transformation of nature for the new society. The second, from the collapse of the USSR, was marked by adaptation to new geopolitical realities, with changes in socio-environmental relations and the search for more resilient alternatives after the peak oil of the 1990s.

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) is a visual arts led interdisciplinary research project that challenges the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene by asserting the constitutive role of the environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. Led by Dr. Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the project was selected for a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) and is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Image: Courtesy of Reinaldo Funes Monzote.