The constructed reef: corals from Cuba

Corals from Cuba tell a little-known story of science and politics, of collecting and destruction, of images and likenesses.

Less than a decade after the Cuban Revolution, scientists and taxidermists from the Institute for Special Zoology and the Zoological Museum of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (HU) set off to the coast of Cuba in 1967. A ten-metre-wide section of reef, true to its original form, was to be brought to the GDR capital for the Berlin public. However, plans soon changed. The aim was no longer to salvage an original reef, but rather to collect particularly appealing corals and fish and combine them to form a “typical likeness”. With hammers, chisels, jackhammers and harpoons, and mobilising enormous resources, the team quarried the various corals from different formations and caught fish and other organisms for eight weeks, together with five recreational divers from the GDR’s Society for Sport and Technology (GST) and colleagues from the Institute of Oceanology at the Cuban Academy of Sciences.

Public staging of the dismantling

The Zoological Museum and the Institute for Special Zoology were merged in 1968 to form the Museum für Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History) at the HU. The reef was to become the main attraction of the museum, which wanted to make a new name for itself after strong criticism. Even the dismantling was a public staging. A DEFA team (more information can be found on the DEFA FOUNDATION’S WEBSITE) accompanied the expedition and presented it in the film “Telegramm aus Cuba” (“Telegram from Cuba”) as an ambitious technical, sporting and scientific undertaking – a moment of national appropriation of “our reef”. The Cuban involvement in the project, which only came about through the treaty of friendship signed in 1962 between the HU and the Universidad de La Habana, remained largely invisible.

Transport crates from Cuba

Some of the objects from the “Marine Invertebrates” collection that were never exhibited can now be seen in the inaugural exhibition of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in the Humboldt Forum. They tell a little-known story of science and politics, of collecting and destruction, of images and likenesses. In exemplary fashion, they illustrate the Humboldtian idea of thinking about human and natural phenomena together and depicting these relationships and interactions by bringing together objects from all over the world.

Translation: Josephine Draper