The Allure of Technology: Photographs, Statistics and the Elusive Female Criminal in 1930s Cuba

Abstract

In 1929, a book entitled La delincuencia femenina en Cuba (Female Delinquency in Cuba) presented its readers with an unprecedented collection of photographs of incarcerated women. Its author, Cuban criminologist Israel Castellanos, had assembled 400 images, from the front and in profile, of women convicted of crimes and serving sentences in Havana's prison. He arranged them in alphabetical order: the faces of hundreds of women of all ages, deemed 'black', 'white' or 'mestiza' by the anonymous authors of the accompanying captions, filled page after page of the book. Castellanos also provided statistics on the number, frequency and types of crimes committed, and listed the educational and marital status of women whose lives had intersected at one time or another with Cuba's criminal justice system. 1 In two volumes, the first of which bears a dedication to Gerardo Machado, president of Cuba at the time of publication, this book announces its aspiration to be the most complete, up-to-date pronouncement on criminology's neglected arena, female delinquency. This is an unusual text in several ways. Among dozens of criminological studies published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, very few had focused on female criminality. 2 The relative lack of interest derived from a presumed weakness of the female propensity to crime. Most criminologists subscribed to views of crime as principally a male enterprise, understanding women as occasional, and not terribly interesting, offenders. At the same time, narratives about female criminality were very much part of popular and official discourses in Latin America as well as Europe and North America. Women as prostitutes, hysterics, committers of infanticide and shoplifters were the targets of reform movements, the stars of the tabloid press and the subjects of psychoanalytic theory. 3 While gender, morality and criminality were in some ways deeply implicated in one another, criminologists of the early twentieth century paid very little attention to the category of the female criminal. Castellanos's study reflects this contradictory phenomenon as the lone text on female delinquency in Cuba even as it affirms that the subject merited close attention. 4 It is the staggering amount of photography and statistical charts and graphs, however, which make these volumes so unusual for a criminological text. Abroad, both

Image and Authority: Political Trials Captured in Cuba and Panamá, 1955-1959

“…In Cuba, Israel Castellanos had created, among other things, a three-volume album in which pictures of female delinquents were offered alongside voluminous statistics on the offenders. 48 No one questioned the origin of these techniques or their political meanings. But we must not forget a third way in which the photograph was involved in the judicial process: as evidence to reject specific claims made by the state, as it prosecutes a person; or, as in the cases before us, to dispute the validity of the entire judicial process.…”

The Fantastic Flying Donkey and the Tattoo

“…15 Yet at times the archiving impulse would interfere with what Machado might have envisioned as the most efficient use of a repressive apparatus, as when Castellanos assembled some 600 photographs of Cuban female "delinquents" only to conclude that female delinquency was not a serious problem in Cuba. 16 Less is known about Raimundo de Castro, who was professor of legal medicine at the University of Havana and under whom Castellanos served as assistant professor. Certainly he was connected to the increasingly visible medical establishment as the state expanded its role in public health.…”

Doblemente sometidas: las «mujeres de color» en la república de Cuba (1902-1959)

“…85 Sobre la construcción social del racismo y su perpetuación en las sociedades occidentales, ver Foucault, 1998. Acerca del racismo en Cuba tras la Guerra de Independencia de 1898, Naranjo Orovio, 1996;2006;2007. Naranjo Orovio y García, 2000.…”