Sex and the Ordinary Cuban: Cuban Physicians, Eugenics, and Marital Sexuality, 1933–1958

In a 1940 speech to fellow Cuban physicians, obstetrician/gynecologist Jose Chelala Aguilera contended that an Argentine politician who had famously claimed “To govern is to populate” had gotten it all wrong.4 Instead, Dr. Chelala insisted, the statesman should have declared, “To govern is to populate well.”5 By asserting that such a thing was possible, that a State could indeed “populate well,” Chelala was alluding to the eugenic concept that, with careful planning and policymaking, nation-states could do much to improve the quality and “fitness” of their citizenry. Simply put, eugenics was the science of improving human breeding based upon theories of heredity. It was a novel way of applying science to the regulation of sexual reproduction in the late-19th and 20th centuries. Eugenicists proposed that this new science, based on Lamarckian or Mendelian theories of heredity, could be used to improve the quality of humans. Early scholars claimed that the eugenic movement ended in the 1930s and 1940s once the general public became aware of past Nazi abuses of eugenics and as advances in genetic science debunked the science of eugenics.6 Many researchers have highlighted the racist ideologies pervasive in many eugenicists' endeavors and emphasized the role of the state in enacting regulatory measures influenced by eugenics.7 More recently, by demonstrating that eugenic ideas and language were shared by a wide variety of social groups and were put into practice in a variety of ways well into the 1960s and 1970s, historians have broadened the scope of what we can label eugenic endeavors; reinterpreted the seeming inconsistencies in eugenicists' long-term careers; and described the persistence of eugenic efforts well.8 Indeed, looking back on the heyday of the eugenics movement, most scholars would agree with Frank Dikotter that “eugenics was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a ‘modern’ way of talking about social problems in biological terms.”9 Recent scholarship that focuses on gender, sexuality, and U.S. eugenics after World War II illustrates that eugenicists began to believe that eugenics could be understood and even practiced by laypeople within the more intimate realm of their private lives. Instead of advocating for political or institutional measures to facilitate eugenic improvements, these postwar era eugenicists targeted laypeople and promoted normative and unequal gender roles within marriage as a means to maintain stable, reproductive family relations.10 A similar shift towards encouraging people to create and maintain stable families occurred among Cuban eugenicists in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. A close assessment of the words and actions of eugenicist Jose Chelala and other likeminded Cuban physicians active during this period reveals that they too became preoccupied with familial and marital stability as a means to facilitate the eugenic improvement of the population.11 Cuban eugenicists began to foster direct relationships between themselves and ordinary citizens in hopes that teaching married couples how to have better sexual relationships would, in turn, stem the national divorce rate. They believed that children raised in stable, two-parent homes were less likely to become juvenile delinquents and adult criminals, and that monogamy and matrimony were indicative of moral advancement in a democratic nation. For these physicians, the “problem” of divorce and the breakup of the “traditional” family in Cuba was indicative of larger national problems that swelled as Cubans set about creating new, democratic Cuban Republic. The period under scrutiny in this essay, 1933-1959, is referred to by historians as the “Second Cuban Republic” to signal a brief episode of democratic renovation and subsequent dictatorship. After more than four centuries of Spanish colonization, Cubans had fought for and all but won independence in 1898 only to have the U.S. intervene in Cuba's War of Independence and subsequently undermine Cuban sovereignty. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, top elected Cuban officials were backed by the U.S, and Cubans enacted U.S.-supported constitutional amendments that enabled on-going U.S. military interventions in Cuba. In addition to political interference, strategic investment in Cuban economy by private U.S. parties and Cubans' cultural turn towards all things “American” reflected the deepening U.S. influence in Cuba. For all purposes, by 1930, independence from Spain had quickly evolved into a neo-colonial relationship with the U.S.12 In 1933, military general Fulgencio Batista led a coup to oust the president-turned-dictator Gerardo Machado, initiating a widespread social movement to make a “Cuba for Cubans.”13 For many Cubans, building a new democratic republic in the 1930s and 1940s meant much more than a rejection of the lingering legacies of over four centuries of Spanish colonial rule; it also meant independence from the neo-colonial influence of the United States. The new government, headed by either the strong influence or by elected leadership of Batista, made various legal and social reforms throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, and it appeared that great strides were being made towards the construction of a sincere democracy.14 Nevertheless, by the mid to late 1940s, rampant political violence and the entrenchment of Batista's increasingly corrupt dictatorship made it clear to most Cubans that the revolutionary democratic goals of the 1930s were not going to be met.15 In this essay, I describe the words and actions of a specific group of Cuban physicians, as they bid for a public role in the making of a “Cuba for Cubans” during the Second Cuban Republic. I explore these physicians' efforts to take up the slack of what they perceived to be a government ill-equipped and unmotivated to efficiently address what was widely touted to be Cuba's divorce problem. These medical professionals focused on divorce, connecting it directly to issues of female frigidity and marital sexual felicity. They argued that sexually compatible couples would be less inclined towards divorce and thus, the institution of the family and the Cuban Republic would be saved from its purported spiraling downfall. They contended that their scientific insight to the biological and physiological nature of the divorce problem enabled them to guide married couples through the “labyrinths of love” so that couples could have pleasurable sex lives and happy marriages. Medical professionals were sure that their own scientific work, not the passage of inefficient and misguided laws, would stem the rising tide of divorce. The efforts of eugenicist Jose Chelala Aguilera, sexologist Angel C. Arce, and thirty-eight physicians-in-training studying at the University of Havana in the late 1940s and early 1950s illuminate the construction of scientific expertise about the widely debated national issue of divorce. While the eugenicist and sexologist saturated the Cuban public with their opinions via mass media publications and radio broadcasts, the medical students wrote for a more particular and perhaps exacting audience: their professors. Although their audiences were drastically different, their conclusions were strikingly similar: female sexuality was the key to stemming divorce in Cuba. These medical professionals' diminishing interest in and reduced dependence upon the State to promote their agendas and new interest in the layperson as a vehicle for eugenics is evidence of the persistence of the eugenics movement in postwar Cuba and the evolution of its meaning through the mid-twentieth century.