Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.13.2.0351
• Pages: 351-354
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Ingrid Hanon

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

BOOK REVIEWS

Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Nuestro Viaje a la Luna. La idea de la

transformación de la naturaleza en Cuba durante le Guerra Fría. Fondo

Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2019.

Reviewed by Ingrid Hanon

Written by the Cuban environmental historian and professor Reinaldo Funes

Monzote, Nuestro Viaje a la Luna (Our Journey to the Moon) tells the story of

the Cuban Revolution’s metaphorical attempt to “land on the moon”, and its

forced return to Earth during the Special Period. Cuba’s goals, however, did not

concern launching rockets, satellites and cosmonauts, but rather mastering hur-

ricanes, diverting rivers, controlling climate and dominating nature. Following

this lunar programme allegory, the narrative focuses on the Herculean ideas and

projects of transformación de la naturaleza (transformation of nature) in Cuba

during the Cold War. Analysing the place of nature in the history of the

Revolution, the author unveils many unknown facets of Cuban history.

The book is divided into four sections for the different historical stages of the

Cuban journey, from the take-off to the precipitous landing. The pre-revolutionary

period between 1947 and 1958 laid the foundations for the future projects of

geotransformación, the process accelerated with the arrival of the Revolution

until 1970, some of those projects materialised in the Cuban landscape in the

two decades after 1971, and finally there was the abrupt return to Earth after the

disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991. The objective of the book is not to

mark before and after the Revolution in the contemporary history of Cuba, but

rather to show the way that environmental ideas were changing over time.

Tracing the historical development of the main ideas and projects concerning

the transformation of nature in Cuba during the Cold War, and presenting many

little-known facets of this historical process, the author draws a thorough pic-

ture for the understanding of the Cuban Revolution’s environmental history.

This lengthy work examines and analyses human–nature relation under Cuban

socialism in great depth, and has a scope that goes beyond the broadly studied

agricultural trajectory. This allows the reader to consider this aspect of Cuban

history beyond simple Manichaean and reductionist accounts. Throughout the

Revolution’s history, along with colossal geo-engineering works and agricultural

intensification before 1990, one also discovers the gradual emergence in Cuba of