ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a plan for the Havana botanical garden drawn in 1822 submitted in response to a sweeping proposal that Havana serve as a waystation and acclimatization garden for plants extracted from across the Spanish empire. I argue that the layout of the space of the garden itself reflected this proposal in order to make spatial claims about Cuba’s status as a valued loyal colony during an age of revolutions. At the same time, I argue that the layout of the space of the garden also reflected the forced and coerced labor that was necessary for botanical extraction in the early modern period, labor that is still largely written out of histories of scientific discovery. I conclude by examining how, in the ten years that followed the production of the 1822 plan, the focus of Havana’s botanical garden shifted from focusing on imperial-led botanical extraction to criollo-led agricultural extraction.
