Revolutionary Medicine

Revolutionary Medicine is a richly textured examination of the ways that Cuba's public health care system has changed during the past two decades and of the meaning of those changes for ordinary Cubans. Until the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989, socialist Cuba encouraged citizens to view access to health care as a human right and the state's responsibility to provide it as a moral imperative. Since the loss of Soviet subsidies and the tightening of the U.S. economic embargo, Cuba's government has found it hard to provide the high-quality universal medical care that was so central to the revolutionary socialist project. In Revolutionary Medicine, P. Sean Brotherton deftly integrates theory and history with ethnographic research in Havana, including interviews with family physicians, public health officials, research scientists, and citizens seeking medical care. He describes how the deterioration of health and social welfare programs has led Cubans to seek health care through informal arrangements, as well as state-sponsored programs. Their creative, resourceful pursuit of health and well-being provides insight into how they navigate, adapt to, and pragmatically cope with the rapid social, economic, and political changes in post-Soviet Cuba.

"Revolutionary Medicine is fabulous. In this intelligent, insightful, and nuanced book, P. Sean Brotherton takes health care as a window through which to view and understand the 'new Cuba,' which, as he notes, incorporates elements of the prerevolutionary period, the Soviet era, and the post-Soviet era. Both substantively and analytically, this is a book of very high quality."—Susan Eckstein, author of Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro, “Revolutionary Medicine is a an engaging and theoretically curious ethnography which masterfully connects global macroeconomic changes to the micropolitics of health in contemporary Cuba, and will speak to a wide range of disciplines and scholars within medical anthropology, public health, political sciences and Latin American studies.”, “Revolutionary Medicine…represents an important contribution to an emergent anthropological literature on the Cuban State in the post-1990 era…It will be of interest to a broad range of readers, including undergraduates, graduate students and specialists in global health, medical anthropology, political theory and Latin American studies.”, “This is a must-read book for the important questions that it asks, the lens through which Brotherton examines the Cuban experience of the health care system, and the carefully collected and analyzed data.  . . . It is theoretically provocative, successfully problematizing conventional models of agency in health behavior and especially in the context of the Cuban health care system.”, “In this excellent analysis of the impact of change since 1989, Brotherton provides a rich ethnographic picture of what this has meant in practice for both medical professionals and citizens seeking treatment…. This is a thought-provoking and sensitive study that will be of major interest both to public health professionals as well as scholars.”

P. Sean Brotherton is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.