Bonnie A. Lucero’s Race and Reproduction in Cuba (2022) offers a meticulously researched and deeply unsettling account of the racialised politics of reproduction from the colonial period to the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Drawing on a rich array of archival sources, Lucero traces how reproductive governance (through law, medicine and charity) functioned as a central mechanism in the production and maintenance of racial hierarchies in Cuban society.
The book is organised into ten chapters (excluding the introduction and conclusion), which can be broadly grouped into three sections. The first four chapters examine reproductive conditions and practices, including abortion and infanticide, among poor white women, free women of colour and enslaved women from the early colonial period. Lucero demonstrates that race and legal status structured access to reproductive choices: while elite white women could often secure abortions to avoid social stigma, Black and mixed-race women – particularly those who were enslaved – were subject to criminalisation, medical neglect and severe punishment. Institutions such as the Casa de Expósitos, the San Francisco de Paula Women’s Hospital and the Casa de Beneficencia, while formally dedicated to care, are shown to have played an ambivalent role, simultaneously providing assistance and reinforcing racialised surveillance and control. While they provided ‘spiritual’ and marginal medical care to impoverished women and ‘prepared’ orphan girls for marriage, they also collected evidence to prosecute Black enslaved women for infanticide, while protecting white women’s secret abortions and denying Black women the right to be hospitalised and give birth.
Chapters five to eight shift attention to the nineteenth century and the persistence of the illegal slave trade following abolition treaties in 1817 and 1835. Here, Lucero highlights the centrality of enslaved women’s reproductive capacities to the maintenance of the plantation economy. The analysis reveals how colonial authorities tacitly tolerated illicit practices in order to sustain the economic interests of plantation owners, exposing the contradictions and limits of Spanish imperial governance.
The final chapters examine the republican and revolutionary periods, focusing on the emergence of medical and legal reforms related to reproduction. During the republic, while new discourses (such as homiculture) purported to modernise reproductive governance, they often reproduced racial hierarchies through projects of ‘whitening’ and social control, including eugenics (p. 233). Although some legal reforms, including the 1936 Social Defense Code, appeared to signal liberalisation, their effects remained uneven. Cuban lawmakers were more willing to make concessions in protecting working mothers (p. 284), but Black women faced sluggish reforms. It was only with the post-revolutionary reforms of the late twentieth century that abortion was decriminalised more systematically, although persistent racial and socio-economic inequalities continued to shape access to reproductive care and resources. In the context of the global economic recessions in the 1930s, many families struggled to feed their children, if not, impoverished women and mothers sought abortion as one of the few choices at their disposal to help them and their families survive the economic plight.
In the revolutionary period, there were shifts and also continuities. In 1979, the Cuban revolutionary government introduced a new penal code that formally ended the criminal investigation of abortion and miscarriage, alongside broader economic adjustments, including the expansion of tourism, remittances and limited private enterprise. Yet persistent racial and socio-economic inequalities, particularly in access to nutrition and social provision, continued to shape women’s lived experiences and posed new challenges to post-revolutionary public life. As Dorothy Roberts has argued, reproduction has historically functioned as a mechanism of racial inequality, but it may also constitute a potential site of emancipation. By foregrounding the intertwined roles of medicalisation, charity and criminalisation, Lucero’s analysis points to the possibility that these same institutional configurations might be reconfigured towards more equitable ends, enabling greater bodily autonomy and reproductive choice (p. 310).
One of the book’s central contributions lies in its demonstration of how reproductive governance operated as a key site through which racial inequality was produced and contested over time. Lucero foregrounds the interplay between medical expertise, legal frameworks and charitable institutions, showing how these domains collectively structured women’s reproductive lives in profoundly unequal ways. The analysis also highlights the enduring marginalisation of Black midwives and the role of medical and judicial authorities in policing the reproductive practices of women of colour.
At points, the narrative would benefit from a more explicit engagement with broader theoretical debates on race, gender and state formation in Latin America, which could further strengthen the book’s analytical reach beyond the Cuban case. Nonetheless, Race and Reproduction in Cuba represents a significant contribution to the historiography of reproduction, race and social policy in the region. It offers a compelling account of the ways in which reproductive control has historically functioned both as an instrument of domination and as a potential terrain of contestation.
