A Cuban Sugar Heiress and the Making of American Primate Science

In 1915 in Havana, Rosalía Abreu became the first person in the world to breed a chimpanzee in captivity. The 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 to the legacies of enslaved labor – to illuminate the legacies of the Caribbean plantation in twentieth-century laboratory science.

Catherine Mas is an associate professor of history at Florida International University. Her forthcoming book, Sweet Captivity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), revisits the history of primatology through the life of Rosalía Abreu and her extraordinary collection of apes in early twentieth-century Havana.