“We Cubans Are Obligated Like Cats to Have a Clean Face”: Malaria, Quarantine, and Race in Neocolonial Cuba, 1898-1940

Abstract

In a paper presented to the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana on December 14, 1923, Dr. Jorge LeRoy y Cassá identified the “unsanitary immigration” to Cuba of Haitians and British West Indians as his country's most pressing health problem. “Those undesirable elements,” he contended, had introduced malaria, smallpox, typhoid fever, and intestinal parasites into eastern Cuba, maladies which then spread to the rest of the island. Through their “vices,” “violent crimes,” and “nefarious practices of brujerí;a [witchcraft],” in fact, Afro-Caribbean immigrants constituted a “double threat”—moral as well as physical—to the health of the Cuban nation. Somewhat surprisingly, the man who was later hailed as the “Father of Cuban Sanitary Statistics” mustered no direct evidence to support his condemnation of West Indian immigration on medical grounds. But such proof was hardly necessary for his esteemed audience. Although the medical doctors and public health officials assembled before LeRoy y Cassa at the Academy of Sciences may have differed on the issue of prohibiting.