LavenderRed_Cubabook

AIDS quarantine in Cuba
Care & prevention, not repression
From both a scientific and human standpoint, the AIDS sanatoria health care
facilities in Cuba bore no relation to the threat of state quarantine in the U.S.
In the U.S., there was no scientific merit to public proposals to empower the state
for surveillance and quarantine of people believed to have AIDS. There was no way
to identify how many people out of the vast population had already been exposed. The
epidemic was already entrenched by the mid-1980s. AIDS was not spread through casual
contact. And anti-gay and racist scapegoating, laws against same-sex love, immigrant
bashing, and laws against IV drug use and prostitution had generated fear of the state, as
well as of coming forward for testing or treatment. The prohibitive costs of medical care,
particularly for those without health insurance, also barred many from seeking health
care.
So threats of state investigation and forced isolation only drove the epidemic deeper
underground. Yet on March 2, 1984, USA Today revealed that California officials were
legally pursuing the ability to forcibly quarantine people believed to have AIDS. The
same month, the Democratic co-chair of the Connecticut General Assembly’s Judiciary
Committee introduced broad quarantine legislation after a racist media campaign demonized
a Black woman, accused of prostitution and drug addiction, who was reported
to have AIDS.
Even as politicians were refusing to allo cate the funds necessary to meet the AIDS
public health emergency, the racist big-business media were accusing Haitian immi grants
in the U.S. of spreading AIDS.
The late AIDS activist Michael Callen told Workers World at that time that the press
for quarantine powers was “not really to protect people but to further certain political
goals, to further isolate already disenfranchised people.” Callen said that the singling out
of a Black woman in Connecticut and allegations without scientific basis that Haiti and
Africa were the sources of the epidemic were attempts “to blame all calamity on the Third
World.” (Feinberg, “The government didn’t care”)
Gay men and bisexuals were blamed for the epidemic for much the same reason that
the church hierarchy in the Middle Ages accused Jewish people of creating bubonic
plague by “poisoning the wells.”
AIDS quarantine in Cuba: Care & prevention, not repression 49