To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (review)

"From the late colonial period into the early republic, under capitalism as well as socialism," writes Louis A. Pérez, "men and women in Cuba have killed themselves at a higher rate than people in almost all other countries" (p. 5). Pérez, a distinguished historian of Cuba, has constructed a persuasive case built on a variety of sources, woven into the sweep of Cuban history from the colonial period to the present day. For him, Cuban suicides represent the tip of an iceberg of social and cultural strategies, "a function of the adaptive responses" as Cuban "men and women searched for a way to articulate the confusion they experienced in the face of changes taking place in their relationship with the wider society" (p. 199). Suicide became an option for so many Cubans because it "dwelled in the domains of daily life, at every turn, in an imaginary context where awareness of its possibility and acquiescence to its admissibility contributed to its feasibility" (p. 384). Pérez is not so much claiming that suicide was ordinary, as that "it was not extraordinary" (p. 384).

This is a well-argued and fascinating book that speaks to both historians and suicide experts. For the former, the study suggests that the Cuban rhetoric of self-sacrifice is more than a metaphor. For the latter, it insists that suicide must be examined in specific historical contexts, as "a culturally plausible way to cope with life, to be exercised on those occasions when the gravity of life demanded that something [italics in original] be done—as an act of will, a way to obtain relief from an unbearable condition" (p. 385).

Although his citations and discussion reveal a deep engagement with suicide literature, Pérez never defines suicide, but prefers to allow his examples to speak for themselves. This authorizes him to combine a wide range of self-destructive behaviors with proximate causes distinct enough that a reader may question the appropriateness of portraying them as the same behavior, beyond the fact that they result in a similar outcome. Nowhere is this more graphic than in his distinction between male and female suicides. "Perhaps among the most compelling aspects of suicidal behavior are found," he writes,"in the multiple levels at which gender acted to delineate the practice of self destruction" (p. 173). For instance, "both men and women . . . experienced life very differently from one another" and "learned to aspire to very different means of self-fulfillment at different phases of their lives," which "must be considered as a factor of central relevance to the practice of suicide in Cuba" (p. 173). Most female Cuban suicides took place among younger women, and male suicides among older men. Women, Pérez finds, were much more likely than "men to have used suicide as a means of manipulation"; thus, for women, "suicide developed into a culturally conditioned means to mediate the disadvantages of unequal power relationships" (p. 288). Pérez's examples of female suicides are women who had, or were perceived as having, transgressed patriarchal values—whether as actors or victims. Having internalized those values, these women followed social conventions to their logical conclusions.

In contrast, males, particularly in the revolutionary period, pursued self-destructive behaviors both real and metaphorical—most often portrayed as heroic sacrifice—in service of the Patria. Of course, there are numerous examples of suicides related to depression, but Pérez's contribution is to demonstrate that the high rate of Cuban suicide (that is, greater than one would expect from mental disorders) can be attributed to historically specific cultural responses to political and social stress.

Since the publication of Durkheim's classic study Suicide (1897), increases in suicide rates have been tied to the alienating forces associated with modernity, which Durkheim labeled as "anomie" (alienation) and "egoism" (extreme individualism).¹ Although Pérez does not say so explicitly...