Abstract
This article analyzes Cuban-Soviet attempts to bridge the East and the West within the branch of tropical science. The article pays careful attention to Russian-language documents that chronicle Soviet exploration in environmental research, as well as Spanish-language sources revealing Cubans' reception of such exploration. Research and debates within tropical science provided an important space for Cuban scientists to assert the intellectual and economic advantages Cuba offered to the socialist bloc and the Global South. Soviet scientists' encounters with Cuba's tropical nature revealed the limitations of Soviet knowledge to the realities of Cuba's natural world. The article argues for the important role of Cuban scientists (both before and after the Cuban Revolution) in developing a philosophy of science that rejected collaboration based on intellectual imperialism, even if its collaborators were one of the country's greatest benefactors.