Eduardo Bernabe Ordaz Ducunge, who has died at 84, was director of Havana’s psychiatric hospital for more than 40 years.

The post earned him popular acclaim among pro-Castro Cubans for his eccentric approach, but criticism from international human rights groups and vilification from exiles in the United States who said that the hospital was used to torture political dissidents.

Ordaz admitted that critics of the regime were sometimes kept in the sprawling hospital complex, near Jose Marti International Airport, but insisted that they were”admitted”and treated — electric shocks included — purely as part of necessary and legitimate medical therapy. Many anti-Castro exiles who spent time in the hospital, known to Cubans as the Mazorra after a 19th-century Spanish colonial landowner, begged to differ.

His most extreme critics compared Ordaz with the Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who performed experiments on Jewish inmates at Auschwitz. Although there were never any reports of dissidents dying in the hospital, nor any evidence that Ordaz was directly involved in their maltreatment, human rights groups blamed him for at least turning a blind eye while Fidel Castro’s intelligence agents mistreated — and sometimes tortured — critics of the regime in outlying “punishment pavilions” or self-contained wards.

International psychiatrists, including some from Britain, often described the Mazorra as a “model hospital.” Cuban exiles previously held within its walls, however, said foreign visitors were given a “sanitized” tour of the hospital, and kept well away from the “pavilions” that housed dozens of political dissidents among the 2,000 regular patients.

International human rights groups began focusing on the hospital after the American publication, in 1991, of a book which documented more than 30 named cases of what it called psychiatric abuse in the hospital, involving psychotropic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Castro first saw inside the hospital on January 9 1959, the day after he entered Havana, having forced Fulgencio Batista to flee the country. He described it as “a Dante’s inferno,” noting that the 6,000 inmates were mostly naked, manacled and unattended, with no electricity or running water. He appointed Ordaz to take charge there and then.

Ordaz gave patients jobs in the hospital, formed a 115-strong orchestra (a few of them patients) specializing in Wagner and Beethoven, and initiated beauty and ballet classes.

Among his well-known patients was the Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, who received treatment for his cocaine habit in 2000.

A “museum” maintained by Ordaz inside the hospital, mainly consisting of photographs, showed the horrific conditions during Batista’s dictatorship. In later years, Castro was to boast that the hospital was a symbol of his “enlightened” health policies.

This claim was undermined when a former dissident, visiting a relative at a clinic in Miami in 1991, recognized an elderly male nurse. The visitor did not have the slightest doubt that it was Heriberto Mederos, who had tortured him with electric shocks at the Mazorra. Mederos, by then 78 and an American citizen, was arrested on charges of torturing political prisoners. He was eventually convicted in August 2002 (though only of lying to immigration officers about his past); he was sentenced to five years in jail but died soon afterwards.

Among those who testified at his trial was Belkis Ferro, who was only 15 when she was sent to the Mazorra for being a “rebellious teenager” and refusing to take part in Communist Party youth groups. She testified that Mederos had given her electric shocks and insulin shots against her will.

Eduardo Bernabe Ordaz Ducunge was born in Havana on October 13, 1921. He worked as a shoeshine boy before entering Havana University’s Faculty of Medicine in 1942, graduating in 1951 and specializing in anaesthesia.

While studying, he became active in the underground anti-Batista movement and had been jailed 13 times before he joined Castro’s “Rebel Army” as a medic in 1958, rising to the rank of captain.

Hearing of his role both in combat and tending the wounded, Castro named him Comandante on the day Batista fled. But, though he continued to drive a Russian-made military Jeep to and from the hospital, and was buried with full military honors, Ordaz spent most of his life as a civilian. He was known for his thick beard and highbrimmed sombrero, and acquired the nickname “el Loco” (the Madman) for his eccentricities.

He served as a deputy in the Cuban National Assembly from its inception in 1976 until his health failed in 2003. He died on May 21.