Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Nov 6 2006 (IPS) – Each story is more heart-rending than the last, and they all have a common theme: alcohol destroyed these women s lives, sometimes with the help of other drugs, and now they are trying to rebuild them.
Odilia says she drank because of everything, and because of nothing. She even abandoned her six-month-old son so that she could drink at her leisure. My daughter still resents my past, mourns Alicia, while María Consuelo can t forget the times she slept in the street.
They all admit to being alcoholics, and now they are grasping the happiness they feel at living sober for 24 hours a day. Yesterday is over, tomorrow hasn t arrived. Today is the most important day, Carmen says.
Erminda, a character in the Cuban soap opera The hidden side of the moon, which captivated viewers until mid-October, portrayed the drama of those who lost everything because of their addiction.
Like her, Odilia, Carmen, Alicia and María Consuelo had to hit rock bottom before they could start climbing the path to rehabilitation. For the soap opera s Erminda, that moment came when she woke up in her bed with a man who was not her husband, an alcoholic like herself.
I hit bottom when I decided I didn t want to carry on living like that and I threw myself off the balcony, Odilia said. A few days after leaving the hospital, she found an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) group in her neighbourhood that helped her reclaim her life.
Related IPS Articles
She was reunited with her son when he was nine (today he is 16), she got married, has a 3-year-old daughter and she never misses the weekly women s AA meeting. There we start by accepting our illness, and we give each other support, she said. AA groups began to emerge in Cuba in the 1990s.
The personal stories of Odilia, Carmen, Alicia and María Consuelo are treated with the discretion that marks AA groups all over the world. The only entry requirement is to want to give up drinking.
But Erminda s story took the problem of alcoholism, often ignored or hidden, right into Cuban homes. It is an issue that has begun to cause concern, although statistics do not yet identify it as a specific health problem in Cuba.
In fact, the rise in consumption, irresponsible consumption and alcoholism among women is a worldwide phenomenon which has developed in parallel with smoking, psychiatrist Ricardo González told IPS.
In Cuba, alcoholism affects five percent of people over 15, including both clinical forms of alcoholism: binge drinking and heavy drinking on a regular basis.
In our country the proportion of men to women within that five percent figure is approximately three men to one woman. In some European countries the proportion is already dangerously close to one man for every woman, the psychiatrist said.
In his view, such comparative data justify the statement that alcoholism is not a health problem among women in Cuba, although preventive policies take it into account because of the enormous risk to unborn and breastfeeding children.
Many experts associate the rise of alcoholism among women with the progress in socialisation, participation and the inclusion of women in all spheres of the social and economic life of the country.
According to González, the head of Addiction Treatment Services at the Havana Psychiatric Hospital, and president of the Cuban Society of Psychiatry, alcoholism is determined by a mosaic of factors, in which hedonism (pleasure-seeking) and socio-cultural circumstances play an important part.
In seeking the causes of alcoholism in women, one must not lose sight of the higher frequency of depression among the female sex, worldwide, and the relatively frequent use of alcohol to alleviate symptoms.
Other experts note that alcoholism is highly correlated with a family history of alcohol abuse. In these cases, excess consumption begins at an earlier age, the prognosis is worse, and there is a higher association with other psychiatric disorders.
In the global picture, the problem of alcoholism is only absent in countries of Islamic and Jewish culture when they have not been Westernised, said González, in whose opinion women s consumption of alcohol and tobacco in the industrialised world may outstrip that of men.
World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics indicate that Latin America and the Caribbean have the highest percentage of deaths attributable to excessive alcohol consumption, 4.5 percent of the total number, compared to 1.3 percent in wealthy regions and 1..6 percent for other developing regions.
A 2002 World Bank study, Gender Dimensions of Alcohol Consumption and Alcohol-Related Problems in Latin America and the Caribbean , said that both men and women are subject to socio-cultural pressures when it comes to alcoholism.
The study said that, in general, men and women are expected to drink and they are encouraged to do so, although women face greater social control in terms of when and where they should drink.
And there s the catch, according to Antonio, a member of AA in Havana. In our countries with their machista (male supremacist)culture, drinking is men s business. Women hide their drinking, even from their closest relatives, who only become aware of the problem when physical and mental deterioration is already enormous, he told IPS.
The study also reported that the effects of alcohol on either sex are not the same, as owing to physiological differences, women have a higher blood level of alcohol after drinking a similar amount.
Women are also more susceptible to liver diseases caused by alcohol, in a shorter time and with a lower consumption than men.
Women who drink to excess have a higher risk of breast cancer, and drinking alcohol during pregnancy increases the risk of birth defects, which makes alcohol addiction one of the most dangerous consumption patterns, according to the World Bank study.
