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Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898

Author: Katherine Hirschfeld

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1351516108

Challenging many of the assumptions scholars have made about the Cuban Revolution's impact on healthcare, this volume recounts one anthropologist's quest to discover the truth behind the complicated relationship between Cuba's revolution, politics, and healthcare system. Katherine Hirschfeld became interested in Cuba in the mid-1990s, after reading numerous laudatory books and articles describing the Castro regime's achievements in health and medicine. Cuba's population health indicators seemed to be far superior to those of neighboring countries, the national health costs low, and medical care free at point-of-service to the entire people. Historical records indicated that most of these positive health trends resulted from the changes instituted by Castro in 1959. Few of these authors, however, had actually spent time on the island. Thus, Hirschfeld found that academic writing on Cuba was often long on praise, but short on empirical research about what exactly had changed in Cuban medicine since 1959.After much bureaucratic wrangling, Hirschfeld managed to secure permission to conduct long-term ethnographic research in Cuba, where she lived with families from Havana and Santiago, conducted clinic observations, interviewed doctors and patients, and was treated in a Cuban hospital during an epidemic of dengue fever. The reality of the Cuban healthcare system turned out to be different than the scholarly ideal: it was bureaucratized, authoritarian, and repressive, and most people preferred to seek healthcare in the informal economy rather than endure the material shortages, red tape, and political surveillance of the public sector. Written in the form of a first-person narrative, Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 not only critically reevaluates Cuban healthcare after the 1959 revolution; it includes chapters detailing Cuban health trends from the Spanish-American War (1898) through the fall of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and into the

Cuban Health Care

Author: Don Fitz

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1583678611

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Quiet as it’s kept inside the United States, the Cuban revolution has achieved some phenomenal goals, reclaiming Cuba’s agriculture, advancing its literacy rate to nearly 100 percent – and remaking its medical system. Cuba has transformed its health care to the extent that this “third-world” country has been able to maintain a first-world medical system, whose health indicators surpass those of the United States at a fraction of the cost. Don Fitz combines his deep knowledge of Cuban history with his decades of on-the-ground experience in Cuba to bring us the story of how Cuba’s health care system evolved and how Cuba is tackling the daunting challenges to its revolution in this century. Fitz weaves together complex themes in Cuban history, moving the reader from one fascinating story to another. He describes how Cuba was able to create a unified system of clinics, and evolved the family doctor-nurse teams that became a model for poor countries throughout the world. How, in the 1980s and ‘90s, Cuba survived the encroachment of AIDS and increasing suffering that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then went on to establish the Latin American School of Medicine, which still brings thousands of international students to the island. Deeply researched, recounted with compassion, Cuban Health Care tells a story you won’t find anywhere else, of how, in terms of caring for everyday people, Cuba’s revolution continues.

Healing the Masses

Author: Julie M. Feinsilver

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780520913950

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How has Cuba, a small, developing country, achieved its stunning medical breakthroughs? Hampered by scarce resources and a long-standing U.S. embargo, Cuba nevertheless has managed to provide universal access to health care, comprehensive health education, and advanced technology, even amid desperate economic conditions. Moreover, Cuba has sent disaster relief, donations of medical supplies and technology, and cadres of volunteer doctors throughout the world, emerging, in Castro's phrase, as a "world medical power." In her significant and timely study, Julie Feinsilver explores the Cuban medical phenomenon, examining how a governmental obsession with health has reaped medical and political benefits at home and abroad. As a result of Cuba's forward strides in health care, infant mortality rates are low even by First World standards. Cuba has successfully dealt with the AIDS epidemic in a manner that has aroused controversy and that some claim has infringed on individual liberties—issues that Feinsilver succinctly evaluates. Feinsilver's research and travel in Cuba over many years give her a unique perspective on the challenges Cuba faces in this time of unprecedented economic and political uncertainty. Her book is a must-read for everyone concerned with health policy, international relations, and Third World societies.

Primary Health Care in Cuba

Author: Linda M. Whiteford

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9780742559943

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As health care concerns grow in the U.S., medical anthropologist Linda M. Whiteford and social psychologist Larry G. Branch present their findings on a health care anomaly, from an unlikely source. Primary Health Care in Cuba examines the highly successful model of primary health care in Cuba following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. This model, developed during a time of dramatic social and political change, created a preventive care system to better provide equity access to health care. Cuba's recognition as a paragon of health care has earned praise from the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Pan American Health Organization. In this book, Whiteford and Branch explore the successes of Cuba's preventive primary health care system and its contribution to global health.

Cuban Revolution in America

Author: Teishan A. Latner

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 146963547X

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Cuba's grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island's achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation's Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multidecade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba's multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements.

Revolutionary Medicine

Author: P. Sean Brotherton

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2012-03-21

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0822352052

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An ethnography of post-Soviet Cubas health-care sector which reveals Cuba to be a pragmatic and contradictory state.

Social Relations and the Cuban Health Miracle

Author: Elizabeth Kath

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1351489631

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For Cuba's supporters, health is the most commonly cited evidence of the socialist system's success. Even critics often concede that this is the country's saving grace. Cuba's health statistics are indeed extraordinary. This small island outperforms virtually all of its neighboring countries and all countries of the same level of economic development. Some of its health statistics rival wealthy industrialized countries. Moreover, these health outcomes have resulted against all odds. Setting out to unravel this puzzle, the author finds that Cuba possesses an unusually high level of popular participation and cooperation in the implementation of health policy. This has been achieved with the help of a longstanding government that prioritizes public health, and has enough political influence to compel the rest of the community to do the same. On the other hand, popular participation in decision-making regarding health policy is minimal, which contrasts with the image of popular participation often promoted. Political elites design and impose health policy, allowing little room for other health sector groups to meaningfully contribute to or protest official decisions. This is a problem because aspects of health care that are important to those who use the system or work within it can be neglected if they do not fit within official priorities. The author remains, overall, supportive of health achievement in Cuba. The country's preventive arrangements, its collective prioritization of key health areas, the improvements in public access to health services through the expansion of health facilities and the provision of free universal care are among the accomplishments that set it apart. The sustainability and progress of these achievements, however, must involve open recognition and public discussion of weaker aspects of the health system.

Madhouse

Author: Jennifer L. Lambe

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2016-12-22

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1469631032

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On the outskirts of Havana lies Mazorra, an asylum known to--and at times feared by--ordinary Cubans for over a century. Since its founding in 1857, the island's first psychiatric hospital has been an object of persistent political attention. Drawing on hospital documents and government records, as well as the popular press, photographs, and oral histories, Jennifer L. Lambe charts the connections between the inner workings of this notorious institution and the highest echelons of Cuban politics. Across the sweep of modern Cuban history, she finds, Mazorra has served as both laboratory and microcosm of the Cuban state: the asylum is an icon of its ignominious colonial and neocolonial past and a crucible of its republican and revolutionary futures. From its birth, Cuban psychiatry was politically inflected, drawing partisan contention while sparking debates over race, religion, gender, and sexuality. Psychiatric notions were even invested with revolutionary significance after 1959, as the new government undertook ambitious schemes for social reeducation. But Mazorra was not the exclusive province of government officials and professionalizing psychiatrists. U.S. occupiers, Soviet visitors, and, above all, ordinary Cubans infused the institution, both literal and metaphorical, with their own fears, dreams, and alternative meanings. Together, their voices comprise the madhouse that, as Lambe argues, haunts the revolutionary trajectory of Cuban history.

Healthcare without Borders

Author: John M. Kirk

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0813055474

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Cuba has more medical personnel serving abroad—over 50,000 in 66 countries—than all of the G-7 countries combined and more than the World Health Organization. For the last five decades, they have been a leading force in the developing world, providing humanitarian aid (or “cooperation,” as Cuba’s communist government prefers) and initiating programs for preventative care and medical training. In Healthcare without Borders, John Kirk examines the role of Cuban medical teams in disaster relief, biotechnology joint ventures, and in the Latin American School—the largest medical faculty in the world. He looks at their responses to various crises worldwide, including the 1960 earthquake in Chile, the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, the earthquake that wracked Haiti in 2010 and the subsequent cholera outbreak, and the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Kirk issues an informative and enlightening corrective for what he describes as the tendency of the industrialized world’s media to ignore or underreport this phenomenon as one of the positive aspects of the Cuban revolutionary process. In the process, Kirk explores the philosophical underpinnings of human rights and access to medical care at the core of Cuba’s medical internationalism programs and partnerships.