¿El hobbie cubano?

¿Es el suicidio el hobbie nacional de Cuba? Dos interesantes libros argumentan a favor. Comenta el Washington Post:

"... For deeper insights into the suicidal nature of Cuban politics, there is no greater resource than Louis A. Perez's To Die In Cuba . Writing what he calls "a study of the Cuban way of death," Perez answers the riddle as to why Cubans have the highest rate of suicide in Latin America and among the highest in the world. But Perez's work goes further, illuminating Cuban culture and its unforgiving, scorched-earth politics.

An estimated one-third of the Indians living in Cuba committed suicide when the Spanish brutally seized control of the island in the early 1500s, many by leaping off the steep "promontory overlooking the Yumurí Valley." Likewise, African slaves and Chinese indentured workers seeking escape from their barbarous masters took their lives in staggering numbers, described by one bishop as "a plague of suicides." Subjugation to the Spanish was equally intolerable for criollos (the native-born) and Cuban nationalism from time immemorial is studded with the rhetoric of self-sacrifice, from the 1854 chant of Cuba Libre o Muerte ("A Free Cuba or Death") to the post-Castro slogan Patria o Muerte ("Country or Death"). Indeed, " La Bayamesa ," the Cuban national anthem, declares " Que morir por la Patria es vivir " -- "To die for the homeland is to live."

Cubans continue to take their lives in record numbers: men often by hanging, women sometimes by setting themselves on fire. Interestingly, the grim statistics are roughly the same for Cubans in exile. Former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás shot himself through the heart in Miami in 1977. The writers Reinaldo Arenas and Calvert Casey also chose suicide in exile, as did Miguel Angel Quevedo, the brilliant editor of Bohemia, once Latin America's most popular magazine. According to Perez, an astute and prolific writer on all things Cuban, suicide has been so ingrained in the "national sensibility" that it long ago "passed from the unthinkable to the unremarkable. "

"Suicide is the sole and, of course, definitive Cuban ideology," the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante glumly noted. José Martí, the frail, romantic poet of the revolution, rode his horse straight into a Spanish ambush. In the 20th century, the stunning suicide of the presidential aspirant Eddy Chibás, who shot himself during his live radio show, galvanized Castro's political ascent. Indeed, the sad history of Cuba, and its 45-year showdown with its northern neighbor, cannot be entirely unrelated to a culture that abhors surrender, rejects compromise and finds a measure of redemption in suicide."