Havana’s Botanical Garden in the Construction of Cuban National Identity

Abstract

The aim of this article is to deepen the knowledge of the two projects of liberal identity that were forming on the island of Cuba during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This struggle can be seen in various fields, and one of these is the confrontation around the construction and working of the Botanical Garden of Havana. This study has to be placed in the frame of a revision of the history of empires during the transition from the Ancien Régime to the liberal world. I seek to demonstrate that, in the process of construction of states during that period, the power elites of the so-called ‘colonial peripheries’ confronted and tried to transform the state projects outlined by the metropolitan elites that relegated them to simple colonies.