This is a first-rate study of colonial medicine in Cuba during the American interventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It presents a thorough narrative of the central role that yellow fever control played in US policy toward Cuba and the clear ways in which sanitation campaigns in Cuba primarily served public health interests on the American mainland rather than those of Cubans on the island. Mariola Espinosa frames her study in the context of the field of colonial medicine, inserting the case of Cuba into the growing literature about Africa and Asia and more recently Latin America. Her main thesis is that “yellow fever in Havana and the public health policies pursued by the U.S. government in Cuba to control the disease necessarily highlight not those differences that divided Cubans but instead those between Cuba, on one hand, and the United States, on the other” (p. 5)....

You do not currently have access to this content.