TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 107
One of the chief reasons justifying this country's intervention to rescue
CubafromSpanish misruleisto befoundin thefactthatthedeplorable
sanitary condition of the island made it... a standing menace to the
welfare of the American people. It involved them in periodic plagues
which cost hundreds of lives, great financial loss, and brought business
overalargepartofthecountrytoastandstill.(qtd.inEspinosa77)In his speech, Scudder expressed a sentiment shared by many in the
political and business elite of the U.S. And so, in the years following
Cuban independence and in some circles much later, yellow fever
became a preferred idiom in which representatives from both nation
statesimaginedandexpressedtheirmutualrelationship.
AfterCubaattainednominalindependencein1902,thepressurewas
transferred to the new government. As the U.S. remained unconvinced
(and often justly so) that the occupation administration and later the
Cubanauthoritiesweredoingenoughtofightthefever,Congresssetup
a yellow fever Commission and dispatched it to Havana. The
Commission under the command of Major Walter Reed began its work
inJune1900.EventhoughCubawasformallyindependentatthattime,
thetasksofReed'scommissionhadbeensetbyWashington,particularly
bySurgeonGeneralGeorgeMillerSteinberg,inagestureofbiopolitical
intervention. Reed was charged with determining the etiology of the
disease—which they did, and this proved to be a major step towards
bringing the disease under control.^58 The details of the Commission's
work and the sacrifices members made are in the present context less
important than the biopolitical and geopolitical overtones which
determined their work and its outcome both in the Caribbean and at
home,intheUnitedStates.Whatisparticularlynoteworthyhereishow
what was in essence an infrastructural issue, sanitation, soon morphed
into an info-structural issue of who produced—and owned—the
knowledgenecessarytoeradicateyellowfeverontheCaribbeanisland.
(^58) This U.S.-American initiative was undertaken in the context of the
momentous discoveries in the field of bacteriology made by Pasteur and Koch
and were also designed to put the U.S. up to par with the medical standards
achievedbyFranceandPrussia.