Simon Reid-Henry, The Cuban Cure: Reason and Resistance in Global Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010, 216 pages, $39.00 cloth, $7.00 30 day E-book, $31.00 E-book, ISBN 9780226709178 (cloth), 9780226709192 (E-book).

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Research in geography and cognate disciplines has increasingly tied the emergence of biotechnology, and the changes in life sciences that condition the field’s emergence, to the development of new techniques of social regulation and capital accumulation. In these accounts, biotechnology embodies a micropolitics of life at the microbial scale enacted through techniques and knowledge derived from complexity science and its rethinking of life in terms of interconnection and emergence. Techniques of biotechnology, mobilized through diverse networks of speculative capital, public and private research institutions, and an array of state agents, subject the exchange of information – the constituent force of interconnected life – to the flows and rhythms of financialized modes of capital accumulation.

Set in this context, the politics of biotechnology appear particularly bleak: the transformations in life sciences that promise greater immunity, increased public health, and alternative forms of technology-driven economic development in practice provide the basis for new modes of governmentality that govern life at its molecular intimacies. For this reason, Simon Reid-Henry’s The Cuban Cure: Reason and Resistance in Global Science offers an important counter-history of biotechnology in Cuba which points to the field’s multiplicity and heterogeneity. Drawing on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Reid-Henry provides an empirically detailed analysis of Cuban biotechnology from the 1980s through the mid-2000s. His genealogical approach focuses on the constitutive conflicts and tensions between a distinctly Cuban form of scientific practice and the totalizing drive of Western biocapitalism. Most importantly, it sets these struggles over the production of knowledge and regulation of scientific practice against the backdrop of a shifting terrain of geopolitical and geo-economic forces, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the WTO’s TRIPS intellectual property rights agreement, and the post-9/11 preemptive security environment.

Reid-Henry provides a complex historical narrative of the mundane transformations in everyday scientific practice that played out the tensions between Cuban and Western biotechnology. The book is accordingly divided into two sections. The first (Chapters 1-4) maps the social and spatial contours of a uniquely Cuban field of scientific practice; the second (Chapters 5-7) examines how these socio-spatial relations changed as the post-Cold War order compelled Cuban biotechnology to engage with global markets. Chapter 1 traces the origins of Cuban biotechnology as a form of socialist science that emerged in response to the public health crisis following a 1981 dengue fever outbreak. The state’s emphasis on research that could meet its immediate public health demands – especially its interest in preventative rather than curative medicine – introduced an alternative research paradigm that organized scientific practice around its social utility and applicability rather than the pharmaceutical industry’s financial speculation. Chapter 2 examines how the unique governmental problems facing Cuban officials in the 1980s articulated socialist science with a reinvigorated sense of nationalism: biotechnology offered an alternative to agricultural and industrial development programs that had dominated the country’s post-revolution economy. Chapters 3 and 4 explore how the goals of social utility and national development through biomodernization conditioned the emergence of a new ethic of scientific practice. Chapter 3 analyzes the socio-spatial relations constructed through Cuba’s national center for biotechnology research, the Science Pole. Like Silicone Valley, the Science Pole’s ability to concentrate researchers and resources around a central location supported flexible and creative R&D. However, while the agglomeration economies of the former embodied an underlying capitalist drive to direct innovation towards profitability, the Science Pole’s spatiality fostered an ethic of improvisation and informalization that characterized Cuban biotechnology throughout the period of Rectification during the late 1980s. Chapter 4 locates this ethic in the wider cultural history of post-revolution Cuba. The forms of social interaction facilitated through the Science Pole’s spatiality (for example, clustering research centers to share resources and building housing for scientists near the Pole) channeled the cultural practice of sociolismo, or the improvisations in daily life required to get by in a stifling authoritarian order, into a new form of collective scientific subjectivity. The Science Pole conditioned the emergence of a socialist ethic of biotechnology in which every researcher was valued for her role in her research center’s performance and researchers were motivated by a collective desire to help the country, not chase speculative profit.

Key here is how this valuation of risk stood in stark contrast to the precautionary bioethics dominant among Western science that imposed strict limits and standards on biomedical experimentation out of fear of its potential negative social consequences. This socio-spatial configuration of improvisational scientific practice produced a distinct risk rationality (see O’Malley, 2004) that valued risk-taking for its potential social use-value, which effectively displaced risk from the individual researchers to the public’s collective health.

Chapters 5-7 explore the collision of these conflicting paradigms in the post-Cold War world. Chapter 5 analyzes how the fall of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s loss of trading partners sparked the emergence of a new governmental rationality that saw biotechnology as a magnet for foreign investment. The Cuban legacy of improvisational research towards socialistic ends allowed Cuban scientists to creatively experiment with alternative approaches to cancer treatment using techniques that were illegible to Western biomedicine, organized as it was around cultural understandings of health in terms of purification and exclusion of the pathological. At the same time, Cuban biotechnology’s commercialization reoriented research around the production and marketing of drugs for global pharmaceutical markets.

The subsequent tensions and conflicts between Cuba’s socialist scientific rationality and the norms and practices of Western biomedicine are the focus of Chapter 6. This chapter stands out for its theoretically nuanced unpacking of two geopolitical and geo-economic events that reconfigured Cuban science during the 1990s. First is the contemporaneous US embargo and the WTO’s TRIPS property rights agreement. Reid-Henry draws attention to a ‘territorial loophole’ created by the overlap of the globalizing reach of Western intellectual property rights regimes and the territorial exclusion of the embargo. While TRIPS attempted to institute Western norms of individual property rights that worked against the state-centric forms of intellectual property practiced in Cuban biotechnology, the embargo created a space in which Cuban property rights were strengthened by the exclusion of Western economic activities. Second is the more insidious adoption of modern management techniques under the banner of biotechnology’s ‘professionalization’. While the Cubans’ improvisational approach to biotechnology allowed certain practices of science to be more ‘doable’ than in Western research centers, its informal and, to the Western eye, unstructured nature undermined the trust required for speculative markets to function. As a result, the Cuban state mandated the adoption of organizational management techniques.

The resulting formalization and standardization of science compelled Cuban scientists to treat the informalization of everyday laboratory practice as risks to be monitored, managed, and reduced. In the absence of its improvisational force, the strength of Cuba’s socialist science – its focus on applicability and preventative treatment – became a barrier to the circulation of knowledge and capital between Cuban researchers and global pharmaceutical markets. Chapter 7 details how the reterritorialization of creativity from the informal socio-spatial milieu of Cuban research centers to the speculative engines of biocapitalism conditioned the appearance of ‘socialist drugs’ as Cuban products were taken up in the US in the post-9/11 security context. US officials framed Cuban biotechnology through the preemptive lens of biosecurity discourses concerned with the potential future uses of Cuba’s biotech research.

Reid-Henry’s narrative is in part a story about how the speculative rationalities that underpin global neoliberal order (Cooper, 2008) come to impose limits on Cuban biotechnology: financial speculation required trust and faith derived from strict adherence to formalized standards of Western scientific practice; geopolitical speculation framed the products of Cuban biotechnology as potential threats to US security. However, by locating his narrative in the unique context of Cuban biotechnology, he is also able to move beyond a totalizing narrative of the smooth expansion of biocapitalism across the globe to chart continued possibilities for resistance in the realm of scientific practice. In particular, the potential of pharmaceutical trade between countries of the global South (for example, between Cuban researchers and Indian drug manufacturers) creates new possibilities for speculative investment in drugs tailored for developing world diseases. Thus, whereas the uncertainties surrounding Cuba’s paradigm of experimental and applied research eroded geopolitical and scientific trust in Western markets, the investment potential of applied biotechnology conditioned new forms of financial trust in emerging Southern markets that continue to support Cuba’s alternative biotech paradigm.

Reid-Henry’s account of the difference geography makes in biotechnology’s politics of knowledge will appeal to readers across the social sciences grappling with questions of knowledge production and transformation, the social and cultural dimensions of scientific practice, the biotechnology industry, and neoliberal geopolitics. But its ultimate contributions lie in demonstrating the value of genealogical thought to geography. His careful unpacking of the power-laden transformations of Cuban scientific practice draws attention to how social and epistemic conflicts occur through the production and contestation of space. Reid-Henry’s documentation of unevenness and resistance within a seemingly all-encompassing field of global biotechnology will offer valuable insights to geographers analyzing how various forms of knowledge derived from complexity science are taken up and contested across a variety of domains – from biotechnology, financial markets, information technology, and preemptive warfare, to resilience-based approaches to ecosystem management, climate change adaptation, and sustainable development. 

References

Cooper M (2008) Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

O’Malley P (2004) Risk, Uncertainty, and Government. London: Glasshouse.