As soon as I received the acceptance letter for the CLACLS fellowship in February, I bought a plane ticket to Havana and spent some days at the Cuban National Library Jose Martí taking photos of the medical journals La Higiene and Vida Nueva, which are not available online and can only be found in Havana. Little did I know that these pictures and the early announcement of the CLACLS fellowship would become essential for my research in the summer of 2020. A few days after I returned to the United States, the flights to Cuba were canceled because of COVID 19. During the summer, I used these and other digital documents to write one chapter of my dissertation. In the summer of 2020, my research focused on imaginaries of children and Cuban nationalism in the medical discourse at the turn of the 20th century. I could not help establishing a parallel between the health crisis in New York because of COVID 19 and the medical interventions in Cuba more than a century ago. The coronavirus did not affect all human beings equally; our race, social class, gender, age, origin, job, and many other social factors draw the ever-unfair line between life and death. In my research, I also found that the political influence of physicians at the turn of the 20th century defined Cuban practices of socialization and discourses of self-recognition. Doctors went on to examine, judge, and publish extensively about “degenerated,” “orphan,” “sick,” “criminals,” “immigrant,” “yellow,” “prostituted,” “black,” “dead,” “contagious,” “mestizo,” “deviated” and “poor” “little” children. Medical paradigms of the period, such as Eugenics, Positivist Criminology, and Puericulture, justified racial and gendered hierarchies within the new nation, alienating a vulnerable group of Cuban children. In my dissertation, I underscore the centrality of utopian and marginal childhoods in the construction of Cuban identity and how these discursive representations overshadow the actual historical experience of children. I completed a draft of chapter fourth during the summer, and I am now preparing the fifth chapter.