Chinese "Coolie" Contract Laborer Hospital Admittance and Death Certificate in Colonial Cuba, 1869

Chinese Indentured Servant Migrant Healthcare

Manuscript & Autographs

Chinese migrant hospital certificate from Havana in 1869, documenting the admission and death of a man identified in manuscript as a native of China within the Real Hospital de Caridad de San Felipe y Santiago. Issued while Chinese contract labor supplied Cuba with a large migrant workforce under a system regulating employment, movement, subsistence, discipline, and medical treatment, the certificate records one individual at the point where that labor regime intersected with colonial hospital administration. Chinese labor contracts of the period commonly stipulated medical attendance and hospital care during illness, while later testimony documented high rates of sickness and death among Chinese workers subjected to excessive labor, inadequate food, punishment, and compulsory recontracting.

Real Hospital de Caridad de San Felipe y Santiago, Comisaría. Havana, 1869. One partially printed document completed in manuscript in brown ink, one leaf. 5.75" x 7.25". The form begins “Ha fallecido en la...” with manuscript completion identifying the individual and supplying personal information, including his Chinese origin, followed by printed fields for province, marital status, age as 30 years old, and parentage. The central printed language records entry into the “Real Hospital” on a specified date and provides for the circumstances of the patient’s death and burial, concluding with the formula “y cuyo cadaver se remite al Cementerio general para que se le de sepultura.” The final lines state that the certificate is issued “para que asi se verifique,” followed by “Dios guarde á V. muchos años” and the manuscript date at Havana in 1869. Multiple manuscript signatures and administrative notations appear across the recto, with substantial brown ink offsetting and show through on the verso. The form belongs to a documented class of death and burial certificates issued by the Real Hospital de Caridad de San Felipe y Santiago for patients moving through Havana’s nineteenth century charitable hospital system.

Chinese labor migration to Cuba began in 1847 and developed into a coercive contract system that brought large numbers of Chinese men to the island as colonos asiáticos. Surviving contracts from the 1860s identify individual workers by name, age, origin, occupation, marital status, wages, rations, clothing allowances, and provisions for medical treatment, while regulating the duration and conditions of their service. By 1869, the system was deeply established and increasingly subject to criticism over recruitment practices, punishment, illness, mortality, restrictions on movement, and the conditions under which workers could complete or renew their contracts. The explicit death and burial language makes this document more precisely identifiable than a general admission certificate. Moderate toning and staining, several small wormholes, punctures, and marginal tears, old folds, extensive manuscript ink offsetting and show through, not affecting the printed text. Overall good condition. An individualized 1869 record connecting a Chinese migrant in Havana with the hospital, death, and burial bureaucracy operating alongside Cuba’s nineteenth century system of Chinese contract labor.

Item #23807

Price: $1,250.00