The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba

In 1959, a revolution based on Cuban aspirations for democracy and human rights brought Fidel Castro to power. Within two years of his triumphal entry into Havana, however, Castro had betrayed his revolution, imposing a Marxist-Leninist model and initiating the Sovietization of Cuban politics, economics, and society. As Charles J. Brown and Armando M. Lago demonstrate in their new work, Cuban psychiatry has not escaped this transformation. Hospitals have been nationalized and psychiatrists have become employees of the state. Following the Soviet model, Cuban psychiatrists function within a strict ideological framework, rejecting Western theories of behavior in favor of those that employ Marxist-Leninist doctrine. And as The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba graphically documents, the Castro regime also has followed its Soviet mentors in using psychiatric techniques to squelch dissent. Through extensive original research, Brown and Lago have identified thirty-one dissidents who suffered psychiatric abuse in retaliation for their political beliefs. With the help of the case studies, Brown and Lago document how Cuban authorities commit dissidents to the forensic wards of psychiatric hospitals where they are forced to survive among the criminally insane. Cuban authorities use electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia and massive doses of psychotropic drugs to terrorize dissidents and their families into cooperating. In addition to an overview on the interrelationship between Cuban psychiatry and the Cuban State Security apparatus, The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba contains a comprehensive appendix detailing the media's as well as the human rights community's efforts to investigate sporadic reports of such abuses. The result of an extensive three-year investigation, The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba provides a compelling portrait of the corrosive misuse of psychiatry by one of the world's last remaining totalitarian regimes. It is the authors' hope that by drawing this terrible practice to the attention of world public opinion, the book will help bring to an end the continued abuse of psychiatry in Cuba.