Some time ago just before publishing my book I mentioned I had to remove some, only some, Cuban history from manuscript. I also mentioned I would be sharing some of my historical research with you. Below you will find more information about healthcare in Cuba before Fidel Castro.
BEFORE Fidel there was a psychiatric hospital outside Habana built on
an empty lot outside Habana called Ferro. Founded in 1857, towards the
end of colonial times, by Captain General Governor of the island
Don José Gutierrez de la Concha, Mazorra* was initially called Hospital
de Dementes. Its initial goal was to provide mental health and
domicile to black slaves who had lost their mind and had been abandoned
by their owners. Slavery was and is a great evil and it was no exception
in Cuba. After slavery was abolished, Mazorra provided psychiatric
treatment to all mentally ill Cubans regardless of race.
Later it
became known as simply Mazorra. The psychiatric hospital was funded by
the state and donations and its goal was to adopt the 1400’s Spaniard
new psychiatric treatment known as Moral Treatment which eliminated
madhouse life sentences for the mentally ill and adopted Moral Treatment
to combine medicine, therapy, sports, exercise, games and
entertainment, agriculture, sun and fresh air. The rest of Europe did
not adopt this type of psychiatric treatment until the end of the French
Revolution!
In Cuba mental illness became known as a disease and not
evil madness. Research shows conditions at Mazorra were not the
greatest but as time went on it continue to improve. By the late 1940’s
it was a well- run mental hospital and you can find stories singing its
praises and evils.
AFTER
Fidel any advancement made in psychiatry in Cuba would change. Under
the direction of Dr. Eduardo Bernable Ordaz, doctor turned torturer and
long friend of Fidel and Raúl Castro it became the torture chambers for
dissidents sent there by Fidel. In Cuba psychiatry would change from
curing the human mind to remolding and destroying the human mind.
Torture with electroshocks and insulin and anything else you can think
of is what became of Mazorra for dissidents of all ages. Many cases of
victims, as young as fifteen, are well documented. Fidel, again, has
fooled the world that Mazorra is a model for psychiatry and the idiots
of this world who are blind from one eye and can’t see out of the other
believe him and again, sadly they include physicians from all over the
world. Imagine a model of psychiatry in a country that practices the
abuse of the human mind to brainwash, indoctrinate and reshape the human
mind of its citizens in the Stalin fashion to the point it drives its
citizens to madness and turning many of them to suicide. Imagine a
model of psychiatry where there aren’t any medications to treat the
mentally ill.
******
A relative became mentally ill in
his twenties, before Fidel, was successfully treated by a psychiatrist
and medications. His mental condition returned in the 1990’s and
without medications in Fidel’s Cuba his family had to tie him to the
bed. He went mad; he died mad.
*The politics of psychiatry in revolutionary Cuba, Dr. Armando M. Lago and Charles J. Brown.
