(4 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Katherine Hirschfeld Page ISBN : 9780765803443 New from Format: PDFReview
"[I]t is surprising to learn in this ethnographic account by a US medical anthropologist that the Castro government has apparently been cooking the books... Her [Hirschfeld's] idealistic preconceptions dashed by discrepancies between rhetoric and reality,' she observes a repressive, bureaucratized and secretive system, long on militarization' and short on patients' rights, with state-employed family doctors' responsible not only for health but also for exposing political dissent... [T]he author, resorting to historical documents, concludes that the regime did foster public health gains after 1959, but concomitantly manipulated both health statistics and the impact of earlier US involvement in Cuba to highlight the 1959 revolution's alleged successes. A revealing and persuasive glimpse into public health under socialism. Highly recommended."
—Choice
"An exceptionally informative and original study of public health in Cuba that encompasses both its historical dimensions and the developments under Castro...This volume also provides a revealing grass roots portrait of Cuban society that benefits from the author's extensive personal contacts and experiences during her stay there."
—Paul Hollander, author of Political Pilgrims, Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society
"Health, Politics and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 is a reflection of a new generation of courageous, fact-based researchers who validate that eclectic qualitative/quantitative comparative anthropological techniques can be mighty effective--when objectively implemented--for deconstructing a closed society's crafty propaganda. In sum, this tome is exemplary science making in the best Millian-Popperian tradition with implications transcending ever-growing Cubanology."
—Cuban Affairs
"When Hirschfeld (anthropology, U. of Oklahoma) began the project that was to become this book, it was intended to be simply an ethnographic account on the socialization of health and medicine in socialist Cuba. After being hospitalized in Cuba following coming down with dengue fever during an epidemic that the government initially denied, however, her newfound skepticism regarding the reliability of official figures and accounts of Cuba's health system led her towards a more historically-oriented investigation of the politics of health in pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba (although the experiences of her fieldwork and hospitalization are also discussed in some detail) This is a paperbound edition of a work first published in 2006."
—SciTech Book News
“Part ethnography (conducted in 1997), part historical analysis. Highly critical of common academic assessments of Cuban health system; questions the veracity of Cuban health statistics.”
—Family Medicine
Review
- Hardcover: 274 pages
- Publisher: Transaction Publishers (December 13, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0765803445
- ISBN-13: 978-0765803443
- Product Dimensions: 1 x 6.3 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 PDF
Thankfully this book holds no dry academic wringing of statistics (what there are in Cuba are suspect), nor is this a puff-piece written by a naive visitor shepherded to inauthentic clinics-for-show or to hospitals for foreigners or the ruling elite. The fascinating heart of this book is the year Dr. Hirschfeld spent in Cuba under the radar as a simple visitor. She arrived in Cuba anticipating confirmation of the prevailing academic view that life and health care under the Marxist system was a model of excellence. She soon experienced an epiphany as she witnessed the reality of living under the Castro regime: widespread shortages, petty humiliations, harassments, official doublespeak, and, contrary to expectations, woefully poor health care for common citizens. This was not merely an impression: she became ill (only later did she learn she had contracted dengue fever) and was whisked away to an isolation ward in which she and other women suffering from the painful disease (also called break-bone fever) were kept as virtual prisoners. They received no diagnosis, no medication, and lived under conditions unimaginable in first-world nations. Despite her suffering, the author will no doubt long remember the tribulations, camaraderie, good humor, and indomitable spirit of the workaday Cuban patients suffering alongside her. She, and the world, later learned there had been a widespread epidemic of dengue though it had been denied by the regime. The reality was leaked by a courageous Cuban physician who was jailed for revealing the truth.
The second half of the book is a revisionist history of twentieth century health care in Cuba "intended to critique the conventional portrayal . . . by the Castro regime and by Marxist scholars in the United States.
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