Chinese "Coolie" Identified Contract Laborer Hospital Admittance Death Certificate of a 29 Year Old Man in Colonial Cuba, 1866

Chinese Indentured Servant Migrant Healthcare

Manuscript & Autographs

Chinese migrant hospital certificate from Havana in 1866, recording the name, admission, and treatment of a young man identified on the document as a native of China during the height of Cuba’s Chinese contract labor system. Tens of thousands of Chinese men were brought to nineteenth century Cuba under contracts that regulated labor, wages, food, clothing, discipline, illness, and medical care; surviving Cuban labor agreements from the same year specifically required employers to provide medical attendance and hospital treatment. Issued by the Real Hospital de Caridad de San Felipe y Santiago, this partially printed form places the Chinese patient within the institutional machinery that administered illness and hospitalization in colonial Havana. Its 1866 date also coincides with international efforts to regulate Chinese overseas recruitment following extensive reports of kidnapping, coercion, and abuse within the labor migration system.

Real Hospital de Caridad de San Felipe y Santiago, Comisaría. Havana, 1866. Partially printed document completed in manuscript in brown ink, one leaf. 5.75" x 7.25". The form identifies the patient's name in manuscript, describes him as “natural de China,” and records his age as approximately 29 years, indicative of the harsh work conditions many of these contract laborers faced. It states that he entered the “Real Hospital” on the 10th of an unidentified month, 1866 and remained there until his discharge, after which the document was issued so that the appropriate government office could determine the charges incurred during his hospital stay. The printed conclusion reads in part, “y cuyo cadaver se remitia al Cementerio general para que se le de sepultura.". (The English translation of the phrase is: "and whose body was sent to the general cemetery to be buried.") Marked “Habana” in 1866, with manuscript completion and signatures in brown ink. The verso bears substantial ink offsetting and show through from the manuscript entries.

Chinese migration to Cuba had developed into a large contract labor system by the 1860s, supplying workers to an economy undergoing the gradual transformation of slavery while retaining coercive labor practices. Cuban Chinese contracts preserved in institutional collections identify workers by Spanish and sometimes Chinese names and record age, origin, occupation, wages, food, clothing, hours, illness, and medical treatment; a University of Florida collection alone contains fifty two such contracts dating from 1861 to 1878, including Havana contracts from 1866. Chinese authorities were simultaneously receiving accounts of laborers being deceived, kidnapped, or sold into overseas service, prompting the 1866 regulations intended to control recruitment and protect emigrant laborers. Later diplomatic negotiations over conditions in Cuba specifically addressed Chinese laborers incapacitated by sickness, contractual medical obligations, freedom from physical punishment, completion of service, and repatriation, demonstrating how health and physical capacity were embedded in the administration of the labor regime. This hospital certificate records that system at the level of one Chinese individual, not through the clauses of a labor agreement but through the medical bureaucracy encountered when a migrant entered a Havana charitable hospital. Moderate toning and edge wear, several small marginal tears and punctures, manuscript ink offsetting and staining, with loss at the lower left edge not affecting the principal printed text. Overall good condition. An individualized record of a Chinese migrant passing through Havana’s colonial hospital system in 1866, connecting Chinese migration and contract labor to the bureaucratic administration of sickness, institutional care, and bodily capacity in nineteenth century Cuba.

Item #23806

Price: $850.00