“Great Calamities”: Spaniards, Africans, and the Laboring Environments of Late Colonial Cuba, 1851–92

In 1851, the Santa Isabel Military Hospital of Matanzas declared the state of medical emergency. A large number of peninsular Spaniards serving at the city's military garrison were initially hospitalized in Santa Isabel suffering yellow fever. Within a few days, the careless internment of a cholera patient in the same hospital gave way to an outbreak of this very contagious disease among the sick soldiers. During the following days the disease spread to another hospital in the city, and for the next three years the entire island would be suffering periodic outbreaks of cholera. In a matter of days, yellow fever and cholera joined forces to ravage the city of Matanzas. This simultaneous outbreak of yellow fever and cholera was caused, I contend, by the unhealthy laboring environments created by Spanish policies in late colonial Cuba. The yellow fever outbreak was due to the maintenance of an exclusively white, mostly peninsular, military force in Matanzas, as its black militias had been abolished after the thundering 1844 La Escalera revolt. The periodic cholera outbreaks, on the other hand, often started on local plantations among the enslaved. Crammed into slave quarters and warehouses, enslaved Africans suffered a much higher rate of cholera contagion than the white inhabitants of the island. These overlapping disease outbreaks force us to consider how Spanish colonial authorities created laboring environments prone to the simultaneous outbreak of contagious diseases that rapidly became epidemic. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, such unhealthy laboring environments would project the image of Cuba as a deadly place to live and work, thus worsening the havoc wreaked by the three independence wars the country fought against Spain. Unhealthy laboring environments where, in sum, one more indicator of the broader social crisis affecting the island on the eve of its long-fought independence.