Cuban Landscapes: Heritage, Memory, and Place

Cuban Landscapes: Heritage, Memory, and Place By Joseph L. Scarpaci and Armando H. Portela New York: The Guilford Press, 2009. 215pp. 83 black and white illustrations, 20 maps, !Stables. The book has endnotes with each chapter and a bibliography. $60.00, hardcover. ISBN: 978-1-60624-5. $30.00, paperback. ISBN: 978-1-60623-8.Cuban Landscapes: Heritage, Memory, and Place by Joseph L. Scarpaci and Armando H. Portela generates an imagination of Cuba in a way that critically brings to light romanticism, scenic beauty, contestation, nationalism, and environmental degradation. From the start in Chapter 1, the authors dive into the eclectic nature of Cuba's landscapes. They focus on the country's contested history to situate the forthcoming context included in the book. The authors give a clear and concise theoretical insight into the landscape tradition of cultural and social geography, while interweaving imaginations of the humanized and romanticized Cuban landscapes, simultaneously mentioning strife and political struggles. For academic readers, the common discourses regarding Cuba are critically supplemented with landscape theory in a concise fashion. The authors first put the country's physical endowment into perspective (and again at the end of the chapter), before leading to the cultural politics and economics of colonialism, suffering, capitalism, communism, imperialism, despair, innovations, and sugar as a way of highlighting critical examples. Chapter 2 serves the purpose of another introductory chapter that outlines what is presented in the subsequent chapters of the book. In this short chapter, the reader's imagination is stretched with intimate details of Cuba's physical, cultural, and social morphology, touching upon Alexander von Humboldt's presentations of the country's diverse landscapes. The reader is presented with a brief reiteration of Humboldt's empirical travel narratives that capture the essencefs of colonial Havana, slavery and socioeconomic statuses, the landscapes of sugar, and presence of Humboldt's shadow memorialized through the socialist era.Chapters 3, 4, and 5 on Sugar, Heritage, and Tourism, respectively, contextually highlight what was narrated in Chapter 2, with Chapter 6 fulfilling the political discourse section. The authors emphasize sugar as the foundation of Cuba's early success, as a result of the island's physical determinism that led to economic supremacy. Included within the section on sugar is the role of technology; this emphasis on technological innovations is essential. Technology relates to the legacies that dealt with the makings of places and landscapes that dominated the 19th century. Currently, the remains of Cuba's sugar landscapes cast shadows of the past. Many of the sugar refineries and subsequent buildings are stark reminders that epitomize Cuba's political nationalization strategies and no longer actively function. This is a result of economic restructuring and a shift towards service-sector tourism, in a way similar to what occurred with the steel mills in the rust-belt of the United States. The authors address the human- environmental interactions of the sugar industry, which was physically detrimental - resulting in immense deforestation. To highlight the socio- cultural positions, this relative foundation chapter leads into the island's authenticity and heritage reiterations. We are encouraged to think ontologically of the past to critically understand the rationale behind contemporary investments, as the country progresses towards environmental and economic sustainability.Often included with discussions on heritage, is a focus on authenticity. The fourth chapter presents an imaginative transition from sugar being a central part of Cuba's past to the present tourism (service) industry as the dominant economic sector. Throughout Chapter 4, the authors build on the social geographical emphasis by stressing the integrations of culture and power as a way of (de) constructing the landscape to acknowledge places of heritage. …