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To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series)

Amazon.com Price:  $5.70 (as of 23/04/2019 07:31 PST- Details)

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Description

For much of the nineteenth century and all the twentieth, the per capita rate of suicide in Cuba was the highest in Latin America and a number of the highest on this planet–a condition made the entire more abnormal in light of Cuba’s historic ties to the Catholic church. In this richly illustrated social and cultural history of suicide in Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. explores the way suicide passed from the unthinkable to the unremarkable in Cuban society.

In a study that spans the experiences of enslaved Africans and indentured Chinese in the colony, nationalists of the twentieth-century republic, and emigrants from Cuba to Florida following the 1959 revolution, Perez finds that the act of suicide was loaded with meanings that changed over time. Analyzing the social context of suicide, he argues that along with confirming despair, suicide now and again served so that you could consecrate patriotism, affirm personal agency, or protest injustice. The act was ceaselessly seen by suicidal persons and their contemporaries as an entirely reasonable response to circumstances of affliction, whether economic, political, or social.

Bringing an important historical perspective to the study of suicide, Perez offers a valuable new understanding of the strategies with which vast numbers of people made their way through life–if only to make a choice to end it. To Die in Cuba ultimately tells as much about Cubans’ lives, culture, and society as it does about their self-inflicted deaths.

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