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  • From Rainforest to Canefield in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492
  • J.H. Galloway
Reinaldo Funes Monzote . 2008. From Rainforest to Canefield in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 357 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8076-3128-1 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8078-5858-5 (paper).

This book is both an explanation of how Cuba became a major producer of sugar cane—for some years indeed the leading producer—and an assessment of the damage to the island's environment this achievement involved. The author has based his arguments on research in archives in Spain and Cuba, on biological evidence of vegetation change and on the observations made over the centuries by government officials, travellers and scientists: Cuban, Spanish and [End Page 219] foreign. He presents the results of this research in terms of the interests of three groups each of which had very definite ideas about the correct, or most appropriate, form of land use for the island: the Spanish Royal Navy which wished to preserve the island's forest cover so as to provide a continuing source of timber for export to Spain and for building naval ships in Cuba; agricultural interests seeking an extension of private landownership with the aim of clearing the forest to make way for sugar plantations; and a third group, growing more vocal with the passage of time, concerned about the environmental change caused by deforestation and the expanding sugar industry, and with whom the author sympathizes. The book is organized chronologically from the beginnings of the sugar industry in Cuba to the investment of American capital on a large scale in the early twentieth century. This translation from Spanish is clearly written, jargon free, as I assume is the original. There are Appendices with information on scientific names, climatic data, and units of measure. Rather than footnotes there are end notes organized by chapter, a Glossary, Bibliographical Essay, an Index and a good choice of maps and illustrations. Without doubt this book is a major contribution to the environmental history of Cuba and the Caribbean.

The first 250 years or so of Cuban history since the Spanish arrival are covered rather quickly in the first chapter on the grounds that sugar industry was then comparatively underdeveloped, not yet the major force of landscape change that it was to become. The brief discussion of what the vegetation cover of the island might have been like in 1492 leads to the conclusion, even allowing for the activities of the indigenous population, that it was then well-forested. The Spanish farmers at first changed little, making use of woodlands for the grazing of hogs and cattle but the beginning of the sugar industry did start the process of deforestation to make way for fields and to supply timber for buildings, mills, carts and fuel. The dispute between the sugar industry and the navy developed particularly strongly during the late seventeenth century and on into the eighteenth in the most densely settled area of the island around Havana, reaching a climax in the years around 1800. By that time Havana had indeed become an important shipbuilding centre for the navy while the sugar industry had been given a major boost by the recent revolution in Haiti which destroyed the industry there, removing a competitor. The author devotes two chapters to this dispute which the navy was to lose. In 1815, after much debate, "the king put his seal on the royal edict giving private property owners the perpetual right to fell their own trees with complete freedom" (p. 124) ending the navy's claims to manage forests. The prospect of the tax revenues from a developing sugar industry was a deciding factor (p. 125). In the following three chapters the author examines the relationship between the sugar industry and the environment. [End Page 220] In the first he discusses the immediate consequences of the edict: the expansion of cultivated land at the expense of the forests. The main theme of the second is the impact on the forests of the introduction of new technology such as the large central factories and railroads with their demand for fuel...

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