Commodity Frontiers and Environmental Change in a Challenged Coastal Region of Cuba

On 8 September 2017, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to sweep the Caribbean made landfall in north-central Cuba. Images of the devastation in the coastal town of Caibarién were broadcast around the world, bringing back to international prominence a port that had once thrived with the export of sugar and tobacco, and as a centre for fishing, but which had long since fallen into decline - except as a gateway for the newly flourishing international tourism on the keys. Hurricanes played a significant role in this region, where forests and food self-sufficiency gave way to cattle ranching, coffee estates, tobacco farms and sugarcane plantations, which led to soil exhaustion and were at the mercy of global markets. Today Cuba seeks to reinsert itself into the global economy at a time of mounting climate-change concerns, and the local community pins its hopes on a self- sustaining economy alongside a newly established commodity frontier - this time that of international tourism, largely attracted by the marine and coastal wealth that the region offers. This brings economic gain, yet also challenges of an environmental and socio-cultural nature.

The project will see the establishment of a network of international and national scholars, documentary filmmakers, conservationists, and meteorologists, working with those active at the community level in Caibarién and surrounding region. It will combine academic and community workshops with the production of a 3-part series of 20-minute documentaries (along with a 1-hour length version), exploring how a history of extreme weather events and global commodity frontiers has impacted on the natural environment and coastal and rural communities made vulnerable by excessive exploitation of land and sea, and the inequalities of the global market. As climate change places under increasing risk local communities once at the fore of intensive cultivation, the network and resulting films will examine both the historical circumstances that resulted in their vulnerability and look forward to their prospects for recovery and survival. They will focus on the local experiences of this frequently ignored region, seen against the background of two centuries of economic rise and decline, environmental change, and extreme weather events.

Alongside workshops, testimony will be collected from local residents, who will be integrally involved in the filming, along with interviews with experts, location filming, archival footage and sequences narrating the region's history, drawing on newsreel, documentary and fiction films from the archives of the Cinemateca de Cuba and Mundo Latino television studios, as well as local museums and collections. The films will combine traditional documentary techniques with a collaborative approach, designed to bring different perspectives into dialogue, and especially to give voice to local communities most directly concerned. They will borrow from the principles of participatory video practice, in which social actors in front of the camera are consulted during the filmmaking process and invited to give feedback on work in progress. They will be distributed by open access, and produced in English and Spanish versions, as part of the new audio-visual outreach strategy, as a collaboration between the Commodities of Empire Project (https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/) based at the University of London's School of Advanced Study (SAS) and the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity (http://www.fanj.org/) in Cuba. They will be promoted through the SAS Digital Humanities Strategy (https://www.sas.ac.uk/projects-and-initiatives/digital-humanities/), the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (https://wigh.wcfia.harvard.edu/commodity-frontiers-initiative) and network partners in this venture. Research outputs will also be published online and in print in the form of a policy brief, CoE Working Papers, a peer-reviewed journal article, and an edited volume.

Beyond the academic world, the collaborating organisation for the project is the Fundación Antonio Núñez Jiménez para la Naturaleza y el Hombre (Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity) (http://www.fanj.org/), a Cuban NGO specialising in environmental research and conservation activities in Cuba and abroad, and through their offices the Cinemateca de Cuba and Mundo Latino television studios. In addition, the project will potentially benefit the local community, museums and archives of Caibarién and neighbouring town of Remedios, Cuban and international policy makers, Cuban and international NGOs, documentary filmmakers, and a general interested public.

The local community in Caibarién/Remedios will be directly involved in the network workshops and in the making of the films. The effect of the recent hurricane upon them will be highlighted, and they will be given the opportunity to express their past experiences, and views about the present and their future prospects. Through the establishment of a local group of participants, ongoing communication and involvement will be enabled. Local participants will also be encouraged to identify areas of particular environmental concern. Close involvement will be established with local museums and archives in the region, and the project will result in a resource that will be of use for their local educational work.

In the longer term, it is anticipated that the network will result in having a potential impact on local and national policy makers in Cuba, by highlighting areas of concern and learning from the history of the region and contemporary circumstances, thereby contributing to making informed decisions about future courses of action. The films are also intended to have an impact on international policy making, in particular in the Greater Caribbean where communities are so subject to hurricanes, by revealing the relationship between commodity frontiers, extreme weather events, vulnerability, and local development.

In addition to contributing to the work of the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation, as the collaborating NGO, the project will potentially provide a strong local case study that may be of use in the ongoing work of other international development, disaster-response and environmental justice NGOs. There is an existing relationship with the Environmental Justice Atlas (https://ejatlas.org/), and the project will feed its findings into this, as well as helping raise awareness in Cuba of environmental justice concerns.

The project will contribute to participatory filmmaking practices, in that it integrally involves both academic researchers and local communities alongside filmmakers in the production process. In this, the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation will mediate with the Cuban Film Institute and Mundo Latino, drawing attention to their extensive archives, as also will be the case with local archives and museum and other collections.

Finally, the network will have an impact within a general local, national and international public, as the documentaries will be openly available online and through platforms such as YouTube, enabling them to be used freely in campaigns to raise awareness of the issues. Likewise, publication online of a policy brief will be aimed at policy makers and NGOs, and those wishing to be more informed will be able to consult publications resulting from the research and filmmaking process in the online Commodities of Empire Working Paper series (https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk/publications/working-papers/), as well as the proposed policy brief, journal article and edited volume in print form.