Abstract:
This thesis explores the work of the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Division in Cuba from 1929-1946. During these critical years, U.S.-Cuban relations experienced dramatic changes. The Platt Amendment, which had granted the U.S. sweeping powers to intervene in Cuba to control disease and preserve independence, was abrogated in 1934 and a subsequent Cuban-American Treaty was signed that same year removing many of the Amendment’s most odious provisions. Set against the backdrop of this shifting diplomatic landscape, the Rockefeller Foundation became entangled in the bilateral relations of Cuba and the United States. It served as a way for the U.S. to maintain its control over the island without direct government intervention, as well as a way for the Cuban government to claim sovereignty by taking ownership over its public health program—a domain historically linked with direct U.S. intervention. Rejecting traditional interpretations that view the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Division as a mere handmaid of U.S. imperialism, this paper presents the complex role of the Rockefeller Foundation as a transnational agent caught between the U.S. desire to promote its policy of nonintervention following the start of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy and the Cuban government’s desire to protect its own sovereignty through public health programs. In trying to satisfy its own institutional interests of offering cooperative assistance to foreign governments, as well as the politically-charged interests of the US and Cuban governments, the Rockefeller Foundation’s public health work in Cuba ultimately failed in 1941 with its final attempt to straddle both interests by proposing to launch a malaria control program at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
