Left to Be Desired Episode 11: Reinaldo Funes Monzote

 

Episode 11 of the SAVA podcast Left to Be Desired features a conversation with Reinaldo Funes Monzote conducted by Maja and Reuben Fowkes and Sorcha Thomson. 

Left to Be Desired is available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website:  

https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site  

Left to Be Desired podcast explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.  

Reinaldo Funes Monzote  

This episode of Left to be Desired engages Reinaldo Funes Monzote in conversation on the environmental history of Cuba and its place in the Socialist Anthropocene. Maja and Reuben Fowkes, joined by SAVA Research Fellow Sorcha Thomson, discuss with Reinaldo his work on the different eras of Cuban environmental transformation - from the entangled processes of deforestation and sugar cultivation since 1492 to the projects of geotransformación after the 1959 Revolution and what they tell us about attitudes to nature under Cuban socialism.  

The conversation reflects on the impact of the end of the Soviet Union on Cuba in the 1990s and how the need to find new means of survival shaped eco-socialist and agroecological initiatives. In tracing these histories, Reinaldo complicates binary visions of the ecological imprint of socialist Cuba, instead highlighting an adaptability of Cuban approaches to the environment since the Revolution, with variable ecological impacts, in relation to the shifting conditions and legacies of colonial extraction, imperial exploitation, and global socialism that have shaped the Caribbean island. 

About the Speaker

Reinaldo Funes Monzote 

Reinaldo Funes Monzote is a Professor of History at the University of Havana and Coordinator of the Geo-Historical Research Program at the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation in Cuba. He has held visiting professorships at universities in Spain, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and the US, and has been a Fellow at Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Reinaldo is also a member of the Academy of History of Cuba and President of the Cuban Society for the History of Science and Technology.