A Cuban anti-drug book casts cannabis as a threat

In 1937, Cuban journalist Antonio Gil Carballo published Expendedores y viciosos, a book attacking the drug trade and the people who used its products. Cannabis appeared alongside opium, morphine, cocaine and heroin. The surviving cover places a skeleton behind an exhausted-looking man: the warning is visible before the reader reaches the text.

This is evidence of anti-cannabis campaigning in Cuba before the 1959 Revolution. It is not evidence that Cuba passed a cannabis ban in 1937. Confusing a polemical publication with a statute gives the country’s legal history a certainty the sources do not establish.

A book about vice

The library catalogue identifies a Havana publication of 212 pages. Its closing section reproduces the Geneva convention, occupying pages 169–212. The museum holding the book identifies that document as the 1931 agreement concerned with limiting manufacture and regulating narcotic distribution.

Placing an international agreement beside stories about local vice gave the campaign an official frame. But a treaty printed as an appendix is not a Cuban criminal provision. Nor does the presence of several drugs in one title establish that their effects or legal treatment were identical.

A campaigner rather than a neutral observer

The museum quotes Gil Carballo describing cannabis as more dangerous than opium, morphine or cocaine and linking it to sinister passions. That is the author’s claim, not a medical conclusion endorsed by this article.

In his discussion of the book, writer Omar Pérez describes its mixture of official documents, street anecdotes and campaigning rhetoric. He notes Gil Carballo’s hostility to literature celebrating drug experiences and the author’s identification of himself as a militant rather than a theorist. These features help explain how the book approached cannabis through morality and policing.

The cover makes the same association through images. The skeleton, syringe and list of substances present drug use as one threatening category. They document a visual argument, without telling us how widespread cannabis use actually was.

What the publication can establish

The date, title and surviving object demonstrate a Cuban anti-drug discourse in 1937. They do not establish the first cultivation, the first recreational use or the first cannabis prohibition on the island. Broad claims about revolutionary re-education camps likewise require separate evidence rather than being inferred from this book.

Later records offer firmer legal landmarks: Cuba’s 1962 treaty accession, the 1999 criminal-code amendment and the 2022 replacement code. Keeping the book beside those documents allows the history of propaganda and the history of law to be read together without treating them as the same event.^[1][2][3]