To die in Cuba

by Louis A. Pérez

"In this 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. Under certain circumstances, it served to consecrate the proposition of nation; at other times, it confirmed despair and hopelessness. It could be a function of heroism or a result of humiliation. In perhaps the most noteworthy and most celebrated form of voluntary death in Cuba, suicide was construed as a political act, a sacrifice of one's life on behalf of some ideal associated with the exaltation of the nation. By the twentieth century, suicide had become a common subject in literature, music, and the popular med