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Learning to Be Autistic in Cuba Amid Social Collapse

HAVANA TIMES — Learning to be autistic? What nonsense! Anyone with even a basic education knows that autism is an innate condition.

Well, I have news: I was just diagnosed with autism. Level 1 autism—the condition formerly known as Asperger’s syndrome. At age 50. Now I have to learn how to live with it. It is not something one “has”; it is something one “is.” And it is good for me to know it.

The diagnosis comes precisely “thanks” to the social collapse we are living through here in Cuba..

When COVID hit, Cuba entered a profound crisis. Initially there were reserves available (both economic and emotional), and a sense of optimism “despite everything”: an extremely stressful situation, but still hopeful, without the current feeling of total catastrophe. There was a solid desire to keep living in order to overcome it, rather than today’s cataclysmic uncertainty. Like the rest of the planet, we were living through the apocalypse that happened to fall upon our generation, much like previous apocalypses: World War I, World War II, the October Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, and so on.

Although I never caught the COVID, my mental health worsened due to professional frustration and the breakdown of social ties. I turned to an online counseling service that Cuban psychologists (both inside and outside Cuba) were offering voluntarily. They diagnosed me with anxiety and depression. Nothing unusual: many Cubans felt the same way at the time.

Anxiety and depressive disorders have long been a pandemic of their own. Vast numbers of people in more or less developed societies take anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants—which makes us wonder how “healthy” or “normal” those societies really are… although that is another story. Recent studies suggest that 1.2 billion people worldwide suffer from mental health problems.

But there is a particularity: autistic people learn to coexist—often forcing ourselves to appear as something we are not, through a process known as masking—within communities that were not designed for our neural networks. Societies made up of “neurotypical” people. I dislike that word; it strikes me as offensive. I do not believe there are “normal” people, just as there are no “normal” countries. But let us leave it at that. I am convinced that the term “neurotypical” will soon disappear from specialized vocabulary, and that neurodiversity will be recognized as an inherent characteristic of every human being: a member of a species that is diverse by nature and by necessity.

What is real is that we are seen as “weird,” and we must adapt by........

© Havana Times