Cuba restricts cannabis import and production to the licensed drug trade

Cuba’s drug law of 25 July 1919 regulated marijuana alongside opium and morphine, according to historian Dayron Oliva Hernández. Authorised import and production were reserved to recognised pharmacists and druggists. His account describes a system in which drug possession could also fall within the punishable definition of trafficking.^[1]

Licensed professionals controlled the trade

The law restricted manufacture, trade and use of the drugs it covered. The recognised pharmacists and druggists authorised to import or produce them had to be established in Cuba. Marijuana appeared among the substances Oliva Hernández identifies in this system.^[1]

The chapter places those rules within an older legal setting. Cuba still used the colonial-era penal code, whose public-health provisions dealt generally with harmful substances and their preparation or sale. The historian distinguishes that earlier language from the named drugs in the 1919 controls.^[1]

Possession carried criminal consequences

The legislation’s reach went beyond commercial dealing. Oliva Hernández writes that its definition of trafficking extended to simple possession and that drug offences could bring imprisonment and fines. He cites a contemporary booklet containing the law and its regulations.^[1]

That broad reach meant a person could encounter the criminal system through holding a controlled drug, alongside the restrictions on who could import and manufacture it. The licensed trade and the punishment of unauthorised activity formed parts of the same system.^[1]

Opium policing targeted Chinese immigrants

The chapter examines these controls through Cuba’s treatment of Chinese immigration. It describes a campaign that portrayed Chinese men as unhealthy, dangerous and associated with opium, then used police and sanitary powers against them. These were prejudiced descriptions that the historian analyses critically.^[1]

His examples of police operations concern opium. The specialised narcotics bureau, created in 1934, reported seventeen operations and twenty-two Chinese people arrested during its first four months. Marijuana’s inclusion in the law belongs to this wider drug-control history; the reported arrests concern the opium campaign.^[1]

Later governments kept punishing cannabis

The revolutionary movement also adopted cannabis restrictions. Cuba’s official prevention programme records a 1958 order in rebel-administered territory punishing harvesting, trafficking, carrying, keeping or smoking marijuana.^[2]

The 1979 national code expressly named cannabis cultivation, with three to eight years in prison and possible loss of the grower’s land rights. Simple possession carried six months to three years. These later stages connect the earlier licensed-drug controls with the possession and growing offences in the Cuba profile.^[3]