Which Stranger’s Disease? Immigration, Immunization, and the Whitening of Cuba in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Abstract In 1804, Cuban physician Tomás Romay tried and failed to create the first yellow fever vaccine. The article analyzes his experimental efforts, foregrounding the enslaved and enlisted subjects at the center of this early vaccine trial. Though a scientific failure, this brief experiment, the desires and logics embedded within it, and the measures deployed in its wake — in the form of European whitening campaigns — allow us to consider the political uses of immunity during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Historicizing these events within the wider geopolitics of the Caribbean, the article explicates the central role that yellow fever immunization played in Cuban authorities’ attempts to shore up their political and economic sovereignty in the midst of anti-colonial and anti-slavery resistance. As such, it shows how yellow fever and its threat to social and economic order fits within a broader history of vaccination as a mechanism of colonial governance. Finally, by situating Cuban efforts to prevent yellow fever alongside the health concerns of enslaved people — concerns that arguably informed their resistance to slavery — the article also demonstrates how ideas about immunity and political belonging increasingly intersected through whiteness as an elite ideal in the era that Cuba first became a slave society.