To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (review)

We all live on our way to the cemetery, as famous contemporary Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodríguez states, but many Cubans have shortened this journey by accepting suicide as a reasonable response to life. The rates of suicide in the island have been among the highest in Latin America and the world since the nineteenth century, a trend that several decades of socialism and revolution have not changed. Why?

This is the question that Pérez asks in his provocative and pathbreaking book. Using a vast array of primary sources, including large numbers of little-known literary products, cartoons, and lyrics, as well as more traditional sources such as government statistics, Pérez seeks to understand the cultural and material circumstances that have made suicide a plausible alternative for many Cubans. He argues that suicide was one of many possible behaviors that "can reasonably be included among the attributes of being Cuban" (11). His purpose is to identify and analyze the cultural frame of reference that made suicide a logical and acceptable alternative and the contexts in which aspirations that could not be realized formed. Thus derives his need "to examine the history of the future" (15). In a cultural formation such as Cuba's, characterized by frequent transitions and marked by the uncertainties of the sugar export economy, the future was the last, and often the only, hope for a better life. When even this possibility faltered, suicide became one possible response.

But suicide was not always an expression of despair and hopelessness. Death and suicide figure prominently in the Cuban imagination. Since the nineteenth century, the very possibility of patria, of a sovereign and independent republic, was associated with armed struggle—what José Martí called the necessary war. The anticolonial wars were little more than a call to immolation and sacrifice, in which poorly prepared nationalist forces did battle against a powerful and well-supplied European army. Despite their destructive nature, these wars were celebrated as journeys to nationhood and life. "To die for the patria is to live," proclaims "La Bayamesa" (1868), Cuba's national anthem.

In this context, death and suicide became an expression of agency and self-assertion, not a deed of defeat and desolation. In an association that was hardly creative, Nationalist intellectuals equated the colonial condition with slavery and proclaimed that death was preferable to life in servitude. Suicides had been part of the behavioral repertoire of slaves for decades, as Pérez explains in an excellent chapter on suicide in the plantations. in some cases, it was literally used as a gateway to life; some Africans believing that they would return home after death to join their friends and relatives. In other cases, the possibility of suicide was used to negotiate better living conditions. In all cases, suicides challenged the power of the master and were a "means of agency of last resort" (47).

Several factors contributed to making suicide an unremarkable element of everyday life during the republican years. The daily press published sensationalist accounts about successful and unsuccessful attempts at suicide. Cartoons that portrayed suicides humorously and lightly "appeared with remarkable frequency in all the principal newspapers and magazines" (264). Some of these cartoons are reproduced in the book, to the publisher's credit. Public figures who chose self-inflicted deaths added to this sense of normalcy. So did the prominence of the theme in literature. Even some advertisements relied on suicides to make a case for the desirability of their products.

Given the sense of relative commonality that was attached to suicide, it is not altogether surprising that the revolutionary triumph of 1959 had a limited impact on self-inflicted deaths. "Men and women in all age categories appear to have continued to kill themselves at a rate more...