Suicide in Cuba.

A report elaborated by the Pan-American Organization of health (OPS) shows an alarming rate of suicides in Cuba.

According to the Basic Health Indicators of a 2005 report by the OPS, Cuba had an18, 1 rate of suicides in each 100.000 inhabitants during the 2000-2005 period, far from the second place occupied by Uruguay with 15, 9 and very far from countries like Peru with 2, 3 and Guatemala with 1.9.

The numbers contained in the report confirm a worrisome tendency that has been developing in the last decades: the Cubans commit suicide in a greater number every year and the phenomenon affects the groups of ages between 24 and 45 years of age with greater impact.

Why Cubans commit suicide? The question’s answer to the subject specialists is a social and political component, very different from the reasons that cause suicide in other regions of the world.

“By the hopelessness, the social atmosphere without horizons, a sort of collective depression that impels to escape via the suicide route”, assured to the New Herald a sociologist Cuban investigator who works for the ministry of Public Health.

The suicide phenomenon as social problem does not have a historical precedence in Cuba; the suicides in the island has varied clearly from the first years of the Republic, but with very inferior indexes from the present ones that go from 2,2 in 1907, to a 13,1 in 1957.

The suicide statistics in Cuba seem to have ties to the social political process of the country. Thus an analysis of the statistics at the beginning of the decade of 1960 sample shows the suicide index was between 10 and 8 for every 100.000 inhabitants, concretely a 10,2 in 1963 according to the World-wide Health Organization (the WHO), and soon shot to alarming 23,2 in 1982, two years after the Mariel exodus.

It was in that opportunity when the Cuban Public Health ministry (MINSAP) alerted for the first time the rate of suicides in Cuba had exceeded 20 for every 100.000 inhabitants.

Statistics by the MINSAP consulted by the New Herald – which has had very little or no diffusion in the island --, reveals that in 2000, for example, suicide occupied the seventh place as cause of death in Cuba. Then, the greatest rates of suicides were registered in the Eastern provinces. The urban centers, headed by the city of Havana, had the lowest incidence. Another phenomenon characteristic is that men committed suicide in greater number than women.

Those tendencies confirm OPS, which locates Cubans suicides index for 2005 in 26.4 for the men and 9, 8 for the women. In absolute numbers, the greatest amount of suicides, which take place in Cuba, affects the 25 – 34 age group, followed by the 35-44 group.