Chapter . . . . .3 ........................................ The Chinese and Opium Consumption in Cuba
O
pium had been used in China as a medicinal drug since the ninth century, hundreds of years before the European empires established colonial beachheads there. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began to use opium as well as precious metals, tobacco, and spirits such as brandy to obtain Chinese silk, tea, and spices. By the advent of the nine teenth century, opium use had become very common in China as a consequence of the deliberate dissemination of the drug by both Western interlopers and the Chinese themselves. The former included the British East India Company as well as French, Dutch, and American business agents. When the Chinese government later sought to stop the opium traffic, the British kept it going by instigating what became known in the West as the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–58. The continued trade in opium, forced on China by the victorious Western powers, yielded enormous profits for the British Crown and for U.S. and British business interests. The British used some of the profits to help finance the export of Chinese tea to Great Britain. The merchants who cultivated poppies in India also reaped great profits. Chinese opium use steadily expanded, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, when massive numbers of Chinese began to migrate to other parts of the world, including Cuba, they took the habit of smoking opium with them.1 While the number of Chinese who used opium may have grown ever higher during the nineteenth century, most users apparently did so in moderation, often for social reasons, without becoming addicted or harming their health.2 Those who smoked the drug in China did not sit slumped in seedy opium dens, with eyes glazed over, as popularly depicted in the Western press. On the contrary, users came together in social and fraternal halls that scarcely differed in any way from other well-ordered and respectable venues of leisure activity and social intermingling.3 The Chinese living in London at the end of
