Download e-book for iPad: Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 by Katherine Hirschfeld

tough the various assumptions students have made in regards to the Cuban Revolution's influence on healthcare, this quantity recounts one anthropologist's quest to find the reality in the back of the advanced courting among Cuba's revolution, politics, and healthcare approach. Katherine Hirschfeld took an interest in Cuba within the mid-1990s, after studying a variety of laudatory books and articles describing the Castro regime's achievements in wellbeing and fitness and medication. Cuba's inhabitants healthiness signs a ways improved to these of neighboring international locations, the nationwide health and wellbeing expenses low, and treatment unfastened at point-of-service to the complete humans. ancient documents indicated that the majority of those optimistic overall healthiness developments resulted from the alterations instituted through Castro in 1959. Few of those authors, besides the fact that, had truly hung out at the island. therefore, Hirschfeld came across that educational writing on Cuba was once frequently lengthy on compliment, yet brief on empirical learn approximately what precisely had replaced in Cuban drugs given that 1959.After a lot bureaucratic wrangling, Hirschfeld controlled to safe permission to behavior long term ethnographic study in Cuba, the place she lived with households from Havana and Santiago, performed health facility observations, interviewed medical professionals and sufferers, and was once handled in a Cuban medical institution in the course of a pandemic of dengue fever. the truth of the Cuban healthcare procedure grew to become out to be various than the scholarly excellent: it used to be bureaucratized, authoritarian, and repressive, and most of the people most well liked to hunt healthcare within the casual economic system instead of undergo the cloth shortages, purple tape, and political surveillance of the general public zone. Written within the kind of a first-person narrative, health and wellbeing, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba considering the fact that 1898 not just severely reevaluates Cuban healthcare after the 1959 revolution; it contains chapters detailing Cuban healthiness traits from the Spanish-American conflict (1898) during the fall of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and into the