In the Shadow of the Double: Psychiatry and Popular Religion in Cuba

Psychiatrists in Cuba have long bemoaned the enduring appeal of popular mental healers, from curanderos to Spiritists, priests and santeros. In the face of this continual source of professional competition, institutional psychiatrists have struggled to deal with precisely the question of faith: why it is that the Cuban populace has expressed so little faith in the solutions that they have offered to mental distress and, more importantly, why faith should matter at all in the matter of mental healing. This paper takes up the interaction between psychiatrists and Spiritists by tracing the history of the Clínica del Alma, Cuba’s first and only Spiritist mental clinic. Founded in the central province of Camagüey during a reformist moment in the 1940s, the facility was shut down by revolutionary psychiatrists in 1966, only seven years after revolutionary officials dramatically overhauled Cuba’s notorious mental hospital in Havana. As part of a broader movement for transcultural psychiatry in the 1960s, physicians and government officials branded the Spiritist clinic as a vestige of a pre-scientific past, which would naturally give way to a medical and Marxist future. Nevertheless, the Spiritist leaders who established the clinic retained (and retain) a unique body of case reports that offer dramatic insight into the more complicated reality of Spiritist mental healing, invested in its own vision of scientificity and social/psychical uplift.