Kelly Urban
- Publisher : The University of North Carolina Press (May 2, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 252 pages
- ISBN-10 : 146967307X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1469673073
Extinguishing a public health threat is difficult under any
condition, let alone during a sweeping national revolution. In this
first comprehensive study of tuberculosis in modern Cuba, Kelly Urban
analyzes the medical, social, and governmental responses to the highly
contagious disease as the island was heading into and emerging from the
Revolution of 1959, providing a window onto broad questions of citizens'
rights, biomedicine and public health, and political change.
Drawing
on a diverse range of sources revealing the perspectives of those at
the center of power and those on the margins, Urban finds that the Cuban
republican state intervened to confront the tuberculosis problem only
after coming under intense grassroots pressure. Cuban citizens forged an
activist political subculture around tuberculosis, rejecting discourses
that blamed the sick for their own illness. This loose coalition of
sanatorium patients, tenement dwellers, black public intellectuals,
labor organizers, and reform-minded physicians won entitlements to state
health care and pressed for other social rights that influenced health.
Their critiques of the state's politicized and inefficient tuberculosis
program contributed to the declining legitimacy of the Batista
government, helping to spur the Revolution and an innovative
restructuring of the public health system.
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