This thesis examines how the recent socio-economic and political arena in Cuba informs the relationship among the idea of population health, national statistics, and the everyday lives of individuals. Post-revolutionary Cuba has used measures of the health of individuals as a metaphor for the health of the body politic, effectively linking the efficacy of socialism and its governmental apparatus to the health conditions of the population. The creation of a model of health care that was informed by the revolutionaries' vision of a new social order, which in turn would help to create an ' hombre nuevo' (new man and new woman), effectively shaped a model of citizenship that was associated with a particular notion of health, and in addition defined a system of socialist values and ideals. Thirty months of ethnographic field research in the city of Havana focused specifically on the Family Physician-and-Nurse Program---an innovative primary health care program in which family physician-and-nurse teams live and work on the city block or in the rural community they serve. Drawing on my ethnographic findings, I explore two key themes. First, I examine how state policy, enacted through the government's public health campaigns, has affected individual lives, changing the relationship among citizens, government institutions, public associations and the state. Secondly, I examine how the collapse of the Soviet bloc (post-1989) and the strengthening of the US embargo is changing the relationship between socialist health-policies and individual practices and how it has redefined how state power becomes enacted through and upon individual bodies. In particular, I examine how individual practices play an important role in the maintenance of Cuba's population-health profile, as individual citizens give priority to their own health care needs, both material (such as food, medicines and medical supplies) and spiritual (including the re-emergence of religious
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.84483 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Brotherton, Pierre Sean |
| Contributors | Lock, Margaret (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Anthropology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002083120, proquestno: AAINQ98216, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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