To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (review)

If Mexico has been often associated with the cult of death, Cuba may well be proclaimed the abode of the cult of suicide. In To Die in Cuba, Louis Pérez suggests that self-induced death may even be a very "Cuban" way of dying. Pérez should be congratulated for bravely attempting to tackle such a thorny—and for some, unsavory—topic. The subject of suicide is difficult and the book is long, at times repetitive, but the text has the breadth and verve of a journalistic account that can make it accessible and interesting to a general audience. Sources are mostly derived from an archive of "high" and "popular" modern culture. Byte-sized excerpts and anecdotes from newspapers, novels, essays, as well as cartoons are deployed in a staccato manner to illustrate the pervasiveness of suicide in this society and how much talk there was about this way of dying. Although there is also a healthy dose of statistics cited to delineate suicide patterns in twentieth-century Cuba (particularly gender and age-based ones), the book does not venture seriously into modern sociological terrain where correlations and hypothesis are generally tested in statistically significant ways. Rather, To Die in Cuba is a straightforward social and cultural overview of forms of self-death throughout the island's history, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It goes without saying that suicide occurs in most societies, but Cuba has had the ambiguous distinction of having one of the highest suicide rates in the world (only topped by Germany's and France's) and by far the highest in Latin America (Mexico's is the lowest). Soaring rates during the Republic were not ameliorated after the Revolution. Suicide practices followed Cubans into exile, at least to the United States where Cubans exhibit the highest suicide rates among all population groups. That persistently high suicide rate is perhaps the most striking point that emerges from this work. Pérez also turns to earlier moments in the island's history and reports widespread suicide among indigenous people during the Conquest as well as among African slaves (particularly the Lucumi) and Chinese indentured workers in the sugar plantation world.

Pérez does not frame his work thematically in relation to any recent historiography on suicide or death. Instead, he favors a more "isolationist" approach, one related to his previous line of work on the formation of national identity—here played out in the sphere of death related practices. Ultimately, he seems to subsume the topic of suicide into an interpretative (existential?) narrative about the "Cuban condition" (not so different from that articulated by some Cuban letrados) where high suicide trends become a sign of an unfulfilled national project but also stand for "agency" and "resistance" to the adversity that an all too tragic history has produced. In Pérez' account, that unfortunate history is often linked to a sugar export economy and the multifarious dislocations it generated throughout the island's history. It is a neat and cohesive account that may confer a deceptive simplicity on a more complex and elusive subject. For one, there are arguably many other disheartening histories in Latin America that have not generated such trends.

One recurring problem is that the author's voice (and narrative) tends to blend in with that of his sources. Historical contemporaries' own paraphrased or cited understandings often become authoritative explanations rather than a subject for probing and interrogation. Other problems include overgeneralizations displaced to an undifferentiated "Cuban" subject, and the almost complete absence of some important discursive contexts such as the legal and medical ones related to "modernity" and the state. Finally, the conflation of perhaps too many forms of dying into "suicide" without clearly distinguishing the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate forms of self-induced death among historical subjects themselves, or the clashes between such constructions may also constitute a problem. Yet...