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I would like to thank Tanya Harmer for directing my attention to Che Guevara's interest in latrines, Stuart Schrader, members of the NYU U.S. in the World writing workshop, and the anonymous reviewers at Modern American History.
At the August 1961 launch of the Alliance for Progress (AFP), the United States’ modernization program for Latin America, Che Guevara delivered a scathing attack on American imperialism. Addressing the assembled Latin American dignitaries, Guevara condemned the AFP as nothing but a U.S. scheme to undermine Cuba's revolutionary role in Latin America and to perpetuate Latin American dependence on the United States. In denouncing the AFP, Guevara chose to critique what he perceived as a uniquely American approach to international development. The United States, he suggested, promised only “the paradise of the latrine.” It seemed the United States was “thinking of making the latrine the fundamental thing” to improve the social conditions of the poor. Indeed, national economic planning amounted to nothing more than the planning of toilets. Only once the United States had taught the poor how to be clean could they enjoy the benefits of production. “It is a bit like … I do not know,” mused Guevara, “but I would almost classify it as a colonial mentality.”1
Che Guevara was not alone among the famous anti-colonialists of the twentieth century in identifying the links between sanitation and colonial rule. For Frantz Fanon, the colonial state's use of medical science formed part of a larger system of oppression, because a visit from the doctor was usually accompanied by a visit from the army. “The statistics on sanitary improvements,” Fanon noted, “are not interpreted by the native as progress in the fight against illness … but as fresh proof of the extension of the occupier's hold on the country.” The “native” recognized the value of some of these colonial interventions, but “this good faith is immediately taken advantage of by the occupier and transformed into justification for the occupation.” Fanon argued that a radical transformation took place in the areas liberated from France by the Front de Libération National in Algeria. Here, “the problems of hygiene and of prevention of disease were approached in a remarkably creative atmosphere. The latrines recommended by the colonial administration had...