Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.11.2.0357
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Date: 01 December 2019
• Pages: 357-359
• Author: Bonnie A. Lucero

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

BOOK REVIEWS

Jennifer L. Lambe, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History

(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pb 344 pp.

ISBN: 9781469631011

Reviewed by Bonnie A. Lucero1

Madhouse traces the evolving ways Cubans understood, experienced and

treated mental illness in the twentieth century. In this vein, it builds on earlier

works on the history of science in Cuba, and brings the island into the histo-

riographical turn toward the history of medicine and public health. Much of

the book offers an in-depth case study of Mazorra, Cuba’s largest psychiatric

hospital. Yet, Madhouse is more than an institutional history. Jennifer L.

Lambe posits that the history of Mazorra can cast light on the practical impact

of political change on one of the most vulnerable populations in Cuba, the

mentally ill. She argues that Mazorra not only reflected the Cuban state, but

also exposed the ongoing contradictions and persisting marginalisation as

Cuban political elites and psychiatrists navigated moments of reform, revolution

and stagnation.

The book is organised along a conventional political periodisation. Each of

the seven substantive chapters is bounded by a key political turning point at the

national level. Although the institution was originally founded at the turn of the

nineteenth century, the narrative begins with the first US military occupation

(1899–1902), when Lambe claims, the politicisation of Mazorra greatly intensi-

fied because the institution was transformed into a national hospital subsidised

by the national government. The main narrative ends with a consideration of

the psychological effects of the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. A brief epilogue framed

around a 2010 scandal afflicting the hospital brings the discussion into the

twentieth-first century.

Lambe consistently reaches beyond the walls of the hospital to explore the

dynamic relationship between mental illness and the state. The first two chap-

ters, for instance, show how the intermittent US military occupations of Cuba

contributed to a seemingly cyclical pattern of reform and neglect in Mazorra

1 Bonnie A. Lucero is Associate Professor of Latin American History and Director of the

Center for Latino Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown, USA.