A Cuban Chimpanzee, the 20th-Century Laboratory, and Caging as Scientific Practice

In 1915 in Havana, Rosalía Abreu became the first person in the world to breed a chimpanzee in captivity. The Cuban sugar heiress maintained one of the largest collections of apes and monkeys at the time, and though she lacked formal scientific training, her work helped launch a new era of psychological science and experimental biomedicine. This talk examines the historical forces that conditioned the birth of this so-called “Cuban chimpanzee” – from constructions of gender and sexuality to the legacies of enslaved labor – to illuminate caging as a practice that became central to twentieth-century laboratory science.