Tuberculosis as Statecraft

Abstract When Batista began his political career as an authoritarian leader in need of popular support, he strategically expanded the state’s antituberculosis campaign, founding the National Tuberculosis Council (Consejo Nacional de Tuberculosis, or CNT) in 1936. His use of tuberculosis as statecraft constituted a key plank of his populist platform, contributed to state-building, and tightened the link between the disease and national politics throughout the Second Republic. The CNT expanded health citizenship through its growing network of services. Medical professionals, however, expressed frustration over the Batista administration’s unwillingness to confront patronage in the health sector and thus further expand outpatient tuberculosis services through reformed local health units. To explore these processes in depth, this chapter analyzes the CNT’s Tuberculosis Survey of 1937–38 and the activities of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was active in Cuba from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s. Tuberculars and their allies also voiced critiques of Batista’s CNT, including its narrow medical focus. Although Batista attempted to silence radical forms of health activism that could challenge state power, visions of broad health citizenship circulated among the population at large, a process that intensified in the democratic opening of the early 1940s.