Salus Populi Suprema Lex: Medical Modernity, Neocolonialism, and the 1914 Bubonic Plague Outbreak in Havana

In early March 1914, Francisco Fernandez Nuñez, a forty-eight year old Spanish immigrant working in Havana’s commercial warehouse district, was diagnosed with the bubonic plague.  Cuban public health authorities immediately instituted an aggressive sanitary campaign in the so-called “infected district” of the city:  residents were ordered to follow strict measures of personal and domestic hygiene, while municipal Disinfection Brigades cleaned and fumigated buildings suspected of harboring rats, and officials quarantined buildings where the infected worked or lived.  By mid April, with a fast-growing outbreak, an international quarantine against the island, and the intransigence of Spanish immigrant merchants who saw their economic interests threatened by the Cuban sanitary campaign, public health authorities instituted a broad quarantine of seventeen city blocks in the heart of the commercial district.  Seven thousand residents were forced to leave the area, and the Cuban army was brought out to the streets of the capital to enforce the quarantine.

This paper examines the local, national, and international politics which shaped the 1914 bubonic plague outbreak in Havana. It explores how an emerging conflict between health authorities and the city’s Spanish merchant class played out in the context of U.S. neocolonial influence and the desire of Cuban health authorities to highlight an effective modern public health apparatus. The resulting conflicts give us insight into popular understandings of disease and the role of neocolonial politics and lingering anticolonial resentments in the shaping of disease control efforts on the ground. This paper is based on Cuban archival materials, including court records and government documents, as well as Cuban popular press and medical journals.