To Die in Cuba

TO DIE IN CUBA: Suicide and Society. By Louis A. Pérez Jr. Univ. of North Carolina Press. 463 pp. $39.95

Cubans kill themselves roughly three times as often as Venezuelans, four times as often as Brazilians, and five times as often as Mexicans, according to the most recent statistics available from the World Health Organization. But that’s nothing new. For most of its history, Cuba has had the highest suicide rate in Latin America, and one of the highest in the world. Why?

Ten years in the making, this fascinating illustrated cultural history answers that question by drawing on sources both scholarly and popular: official statistics, academic works, literature, suicide notes, newspaper clippings, even cartoons. Louis Pérez, a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, maintains that most Cuban suicides aren’t the product of mental illness. Rather, Cubans view self-destruction as a practical, rational way of exerting control over their lives--even if that control ends their lives.

“The recorded history of Cuba begins with suicide,” writes Pérez. The legend of Yumurí—the tale of indigenous people leaping en masse over a precipice instead of surrendering to Spanish subjugation—became a founding narrative. In the 19th century, African slaves and Chinese contract workers on sugar plantations saw suicide as both a means of relief from brutal conditions and a form of resistance against their oppressors.

Resistance can also be more active. Cubans have so romanticized death in battle, Pérez suggests, that it has become a form of suicide. Later in the 19th century, the nearly 30-year struggle for independence from Spain gave rise to a patriotic duty to sacrifice oneself. In “a vastly unequal struggle of civilians against soldiers, of machetes against Mausers,” Pérez writes, “the only advantage possessed by Cubans was the will to win and the willingness to die.” The prototypical figure is José Martí, whose fatal charge into battle atop a white horse Pérez calls a quest for martyrdom.

Six decades later, Fidel Castro urged Cubans to follow Martí’s example and accept the idea enshrined in the national anthem that “to die for the Patria is to live.” Che Guevara’s “suicide platoon” was so popular that soldiers not chosen for it would weep. Many urban revolutionaries carried cyanide pills in case of capture.

With the success of the Cuban Revolution, a new sense of optimism and collective purpose drove down the rate of suicides. But the suicide rate jumped back up in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union’s collapse sent Cuba’s economy into a condition rivaling the Great Depression. Some young people intentionally infected themselves with HIV, hoping to spend their last years in the relative comfort of the sanitariums where AIDS patients were quarantined. Even the Cuban exiles in Miami have a higher-than-average suicide rate, perhaps the product of despair over lives spent in eternal waiting.

Although the particulars vary, the basic story remains the same:  Faced with unbearable circumstances, and urged on by a cultural discourse that presents self-destruction as socially acceptable, even desirable, Cubans kill themselves. To do so, they use whatever’s available. “Progress came to Cuba in the form of gas stoves, skyscrapers and bridges, trolley cars and passenger trains, all of which facilitated the act of suicide,” writes Pérez. After the revolution, guns, medicines, and household poisons became scarce, so Cubans turned to hanging and self-immolation. Pérez also sees a suicidal element in the balseros, or rafters, who die trying to cross the Florida Straits. To throw oneself in the sea is “to assert control over one’s life, an act of agency, even if . . . also a deed of self-destruction.”

Despite the occasional lapse into academ­ic jargon, Pérez offers a highly readable, evenhanded look at Cuba’s tumultuous history through an unusual lens. And for a book about suicide, To Die in Cuba is surprisingly undreary. “Suicide was not necessarily a deed of hopelessness,” Pérez stresses. “On the contrary, under certain circumstances, it was undertaken as an affirmation of hope.”

—Rebecca A. Clay