Disaster Risk Reduction and the Cuban Exception: Infrastructural and Ideological Power after Hurricane Flora (1963)

This article advances theory on the state as a socionatural relation in the context of disaster risk reduction. Since the catastrophic Hurricane Flora in 1963, few people have died from natural hazards in Cuba. The existing literature explains the relative success of Cuban disaster risk reduction in terms of high levels of decision-making and infrastructural power in the socialist state. Building on scholarship on the historical and cultural geographies of disasters, however, this is not a sufficient explanation. As the infrastructural power of the socialist state increased in the 1960s through the 1980s, Cubans witnessed intense ideological production around the experience of Hurricane Flora. Cuban disaster risk reduction must therefore also be understood as a cultural project. Analyzing cultural representations of Hurricane Flora, including autobiography, newsreels, novels, political speeches, and manuals on disaster preparedness, Cuban disaster risk reduction is examined through a complementary concept of ideological power, central to the state as socionatural relation. In the 1960s through the 1980s, Cubans were repeatedly called on in cultural life to identify as subjects for whom participation in state-led disaster risk reduction was a question of revolutionary ethics. The Cuban case draws attention to the role of ideology in hazards governance and state formation.