On the New Books Network, a history of late 19th and 20th-century Cuba, of which I confess I knew exactly nothing. After a hideous late Spanish colonial period, when perhaps 10% of the population died as the colonialists tried to starve out rebels, public health was seen as an antic-colonial weapon, including in the American colonial period.
The 1940 constitution was the first to state public health and healthcare as a basic right. Possibly helped by the fact that there was an effective oversupply of doctors, so there was less resistance to the socialisation of medicine than in the US or UK.
Also very interesting, and sadly still highly relevant, on the gendered approach to public health, blaming poor women for particularly childhood mortality – their “lack of knowledge”, rather than the practical realities of their lives that they just had to navigate as best they could with scant resources.
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