Post-Traumatic Stress Affects Cuban Refugee Children

Colored crayon pictures of barbed wire and brown dirt depict their lives in refugee camps. Drawings of sharks eating people retell some of the journeys from their homeland.

These pictures from Cuban refugee children evaluated by psychiatrists at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reflect the severe post-traumatic stress disorder that a researcher says afflicts most of those studied. The children had spent several uncertain months in the camps when 285 of them, or 11%, were interviewed between December and March for a study by University of Miami researchers.

“The Guantanamo experience was very stressful,” said psychiatrist Eugenio Rothe, the study’s lead researcher. “Children are very vulnerable to this kind of stress, and we really have to prepare for the backlash of this.”

Their symptoms include frequent bed-wetting, troubled sleep, aggressive behavior and suicide attempts.

The children’s symptoms may disappear, then crop up later as substance abuse, depression or behavioral problems, said Rothe, who presented the study at the American Psychiatric Assn. meeting in Miami Beach.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is best known in reference to Vietnam veterans who had nightmares and flashbacks after the war.

About 20% of the children in the study had seen mental health workers in Cuba. Guantanamo only worsened problems that included hyperactivity and learning disabilities, Rothe said.

Children between 7 and 12 years old said the time they spent in makeshift rafts and boats on the ocean was their most stressful experience. Their fears showed up in repetitive play.

“They would sit in the cots and make believe they were rowing and they would yell, ‘Shark! Shark!’ ” said Rothe.

Most of the refugees came in August. In December, the United States began allowing families with children and the elderly into the country. Last month, the Clinton Administration said the remaining refugees could resettle here.

Rothe said the most damning thing for the children was to see their parents losing control. One young girl, 7 or 8, watched her mother try to kill herself by swallowing chlorine.

“The girl started urinating in front of me and trembling like a little scared animal,” Rothe said. “This is like her lifeline, her mother, and she was losing it.”