Postcards from Cuba 2007-2008

In 2003, my husband Phil and I, a clinical psychologist and a family psychotherapist, respectively, visited Cuba. I am a fluent Spanish speaker, Phil is not. Our focus of concentration was to visit, find out about, and experience the main psychiatric hospital in Havana to better understand what was being delivered in psychiatric healthcare in Cuba. We spent four hours with the head psychiatrist of Cuba, Dr Bernabe Ordaz, who was one of the doctors in the victorious rebel army led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in 1959. He had the rank of Comandante, the highest military rank. He founded the first hospital in the Sierra Maestra, where the main column of the Rebel Army was for the whole war.

We had gone with the intention of learning about the way that psychiatric patients were treated in Cuba, some of whom were fated to live their lives out at the hospital, free of charge and to receive all medical treatment necessary. Our guide was Dr Ordaz, whom we found to be very well trained and conversant in diagnosis, treatment, and prescribing medications, but without having the ability to prescribe newer medications for severe mental illnesses because America did not permit drugs to be sent to Cuba. It was a struggle. Now, in 2007-2008 and earlier, Cuba had begun to import drugs from many other countries and also trained people from fifty countries worldwide to be physicians.

Dr Ordaz was well versed in psychodynamic and psychotherapeutic therapies and was very open and revealing about himself. We spent our time walking through all the psychiatric facilities and areas where patients lived, worked, and played. I saw women's wards, divided into small, cosy rooms open to the corridor, with four beds and a knitted granny blanket on each bed. The eating areas were set up to accommodate tables seating four people each, and there were flowers on all the tables. The men's rooms were similarly divided.