At the heart of the issue is Cuba’s steadfast portrayal of itself as a society in which ”normality” for its 11 million people, especially children, means total support for Castro’s ruling Communist Party. The Cuban totalitarian government has long been accused of abusing psychiatry, like its former Soviet allies, to detain dissidents an others under diagnosis such as ”apathy toward socialism” and ”delusions of defending human rights.”

CHILDREN’S CODE

Article 3 of the legal Children’s Code, calls on ”society and the state [to] work for the efficient protection of youth against all influences contrary to their communist formation.” That means, according to Marta Molina, a Cuban psychiatrist who went into exile last year, that children who don’t follow the party line not only run into trouble with authorities but also with psychiatrists. Cuban psychiatrists are under stringent government orders to defend communism in such cases, Molina said, and ”because of the lack of adequate independent counseling, the children frequently became very depressed.” She treated more than 500 children in Cuba who had ”serious psychological problems as a result of their own disagreement with the communist ideology or their parents’ refusal to indoctrinate them,” Molina said in a sworn affidavit.

Based on the government’s view of normality, Cuban officials have impugned the sanity of all persistent Castro critics, arguing in effect that opposition to the regime is so abnormal that dissidents must be mentally ill. ”Such a conceptualization has enabled the Cuban government to redefine some ecidivist’ political activity as a form of mental illness,” wrote two veteran Cuba analysts, Charles J. Brown and Armando Lago, in the 1991 book The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba, published by Freedom House. The book details the cases of 27 dissidents diagnosed as suffering from mental ailments, mostly depression. Many received electroshocks, more as torture than treatment, the authors stated.

SOVIET PARALLELS

Rigoberto Rodriguez, a Cuban-American who heads the South Florida Psychiatric Society, said Cuba’s abuses are similar to those of the former Soviet Union, which diagnosed many dissidents in the 1970s as suffering from ”sluggish schizophrenia”. But in Cuba they are even more prevalent, said Rodriguez, who sits on the American Psychiatric Association panel that investigates abuses of the profession around the world. ”We have reports of a several hundred cases of abuses in Cuba, the same as the couple of hundred cases in the Soviet Union but within a much smaller population,” he said.

The Soviet Union abandoned the World Psychiatric Association in 1983 to avoid its censure. Cuba walked out at the same time in support of its ally, but reports of new abuses continue to be widely received.

Dr. Ramona Paneque, a Cuban-American psychiatrist in Miami who recently attended a professional conference in Havana, spoke on Elian Gonzalez: ‘Elian needs treatment for the tragedy he suffered.” U.S. experts agree that Elian would need counseling in Cuba to help him over his mother’s drowning in November, his removal from the home of Miami relatives and his return to a home so utterly different from South Florida. That is acceptable as far as it goes, said Paneque and three other experts. But they fear that the ”reinsertion” planed will go beyond legitimate counseling and into efforts to mold the boy into a loyal Castro supporter. ”They may try to make Elian renounce the memory of his mother, his rescuers, and the family that helped him in Miami . . . and turn that child into an example of a good . . . revolutionary,” said Dr. Fernando Milanes, retired vice-chairman of the University of Miami’s psychiatry department.

Published Sunday, May 7, 2000.