Scarpaci, Joseph L. and Portela, Armando H. ( 2009 ) Cuban Landscapes: Heritage, Memory, and Place , The Guilford Press ( New York, NY ), 216 pp. $30.00 pbk . This book sets out to consider how different social groupings have found meaning and agency in and through Cuba's landscapes. It seeks to bring the insights of cultural geography and landscape studies to a field of enquiry – Cuban studies – that could be usefully enriched by just such theoretical engagements. Cuba's rich social and cultural landscapes are, as the authors state in their introductory chapters, a crucial element in the formation of Cubanidad; and they all too often get buried beneath more overtly political interpretations. I had high hopes for this book then, not least as the authors are well versed and widely published on other aspects of Cuba. But I finished the book feeling that while a host of fascinating questions had been raised, relatively few answers had been given. The book appears to set itself up as an interdisciplinary cultural geography of Cuban landscape (mention is made of the likes of Cosgrove, Lefebvre, Duncan, and Gregory, for example). But the authors resolutely steer away from any such theoretical conversations throughout. There is no worked through discussion of the complexity of the terms used in the book's subtitle –‘heritage’, ‘memory’, and ‘place’– for example, even though geographers have been at the forefront of thinking through these terms in every case. Similarly, while much detail on the social and physical aspects of the Cuban landscape was given, and the accretion of such properties was rightly seen as a dynamic and contested process, both physical and human landscapes are used in the book primarily as ‘a mirror’ onto ‘what has transpired and what contributed to the visible consequences' [my emphasis] as the authors state in their Preface. I would have liked to see greater discussion of the mutually constitutive nature of social and natural landscapes (in particular when it is argued that the socialist government redefined the relationship between nature and culture), however, and their sometimes rather more invisible consequences. The authors' primary refrain is an important one nonetheless. The Cuban landscape is uniquely rich, as a product of its varied colonial and post-colonial experiences, and it has been an explicit part of many of the social and political struggles that constitute this history. Naturalising metaphors have been used to umbilically and desirously connect the island to the United States (one thinks of Seward's attempt to see Cuba as a literal by-product of the build-up of silt flowing out of the Mississippi provided by Louis Pérez, Jr). They have also been used to ensure that Cuban's knew their place (the authors themselves quote US Business writer Leland K. Jenks's early twentieth century comment that, in comparison to the vast material riches of silver and ore in other parts of the continent, such as Bolivia and Peru, Cuba was ‘a lemon not worth squeezing’ (p. 17)). Paying attention to just such naturalising metaphors offers a useful way to reconsider Cuba's developing race politics, and the interplay of discourses of race with ideologies of nationhood. In this regard, the authors approvingly quote Ortíz's famous notion of Cuban society resembling the Ajiaco stew, for example (though this too contains certain subtle, racist undertones – see, for example, Chapter 1 of La Lucha for Cuba by Miguel de la Torre, 2003). Thinking of landscape as text can be a useful way to draw out political inconsistencies. Where their particular approach to landscape is best put to effect, however, is in the final substantive chapter, which examines competing discourses in and around the idea of ‘information’. Here the authors consider the function of billboards in constructing an ideological landscape. And despite, again, some important silences – such as the way that this landscape is effectively overlooked by a large portion of the young, or at least reworked within their own more subversive forms of behaviour – the authors offer an interesting exploration of the way that a literally textual and metaphoric landscape became the centrepiece of a struggle that took place between the Cuban government and the American Special Interests building, with each vying to promote a particular vision of Cuba onto the symbolic space of the western end of the Malecón. This is a worthwhile book on an important topic. It is clear from reading it that there are substantial insights that a cultural geographical approach to the interplay of nature, culture, and social politics can offer. Such a possibility will be best realised, however, through a more in depth engagement with the tenets of that literature in light of Cuba's rich landscape history. Simon Reid-Henry 1