Cuba
Cuban Civil Society: An Urgent Encyclopedia
María López Vigil
To our readers:
You may want to read this encyclopedia in alphabetical order, or search first for what particularly interests you, a la carte, as in any encyclopedia. Even if you don't go in alphabetical order, you will find interesting information. You won't find a totally linear logic in either case, but this doesn't affect the information. One concept completes another, one entry takes you to another, though not always the one that follows alphabetically. Be patient. If you aren't patient or are in a hurry and only want to read the most essential entries, look for the ones marked with a check ( => ).
Since this is a translation from Spanish, the entry headings lose their alphabetical order in English. We thus decided to keep the headings in Spanish, to preserve what linear logic the entries do have, and put the translation below, in small print.
In many of the entries you'll find other words in bold print and italicized. This indicates that the word is itself an entry elsewhere in the encyclopedia. You might choose to jump to that word right then to expand your information. Again, we've kept them in Spanish, so you can find the entry in its proper order.
Everyone has always known that Cuba has lots of sugar, the best tobacco, beautiful beaches and people with a great sense of humor. Everyone also knows that there are excellent hospitals in Cuba and that Cubans are very studious people. And, of course, everyone knows that Cuba is going through a crisis, that there are new foreign investments, there's a blockade, there are prostitutes, that the revolution is facing problems...
What many people aren't clear about is whether or not there is a civil society in Cuba. The eternal critics of Cuba's system say there's not even a trace. And the eternal admirers say that there is and it's the best in the world. Or they don't even waste time asking themselves the question. Some condemn and others praise, without having much of an idea what already exists in Cuba and what is still lacking.
Inside Cuba, asking about civil society opens the door to controversy. In engaging it some tend to go back 200 years seeking definitions to construct the theoretical framework of the concept. That path can lead to a dead end. It's better to leave theories aside and go to the concrete: is there civil society in Cuba or not? And if there is, where is it? How does it work? And if it works, is there liberty? And if there's liberty, what's it used for? Who foments it? Who curtails it? And if it's on the move, where's it going?
Asking these not at all theoretical questions can heat up the debate, and there will be those who advise that it's a dangerous issue better left alone. However, this also has to be talked about from Cuba.
How to do it? I'll use the aid of an age-old Chinese legend that relates that the emperor, in a time of disputes, confusion and open questions, called in one of his messengers and said: "Put on your fastest sandals and run around the world seeking words. Bring them all here to me. When things are confused, the first step is to put words in order, understand them, clean as much dust off them as possible, fill them with meaning. Then we will see. First bring the words."
That's what I've decided to do. From Cuba, I bring papers full of all these urgent words, ordered alphabetically, encyclopedia-style. They aren't all the words, but they are some of the most crucial ones to take into account to understand what the civil society existing in Cuba today is. After that, we'll see.
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A
ALMA (Soul)All societies have souls. Cuba's social formation of today has its soul in the 1959 revolution and in the political, economic, social and cultural model born out of it. Over the years, that soul has beat sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly. Today, after almost 40 years, the events initiated in 1959 continue to be the breath of the nation.
The revolution radically transformed the society it found. It reorganized the whole of society in the way of real socialism, but with Cuban peculiarities. In this profound transformation, it created the matrix of "another" civil society, different from what came before. This process had its expression in laws and in an undeniable legitimacy that emerged from a very broad consensus, one that continues to be accepted by the majority, even today.
"No society in the world, after more than 35 years and in the midst of the kind of crisis we're facing, can present the tremendous support that the Cuban revolution has on key issues: independence and national sovereignty, rejection of US policy, rejection of a mountain of capitalist measures to get us out of this crisis," a friend commented to me. "And I'm not the only one who says this; any manifestation of sociological policy demonstrates it."
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Antes de la revolución (Before the Revolution)The social system before the revolution had a long tradition of organization and an extensive variety of associations. Cuba in the 1950s had an active civil society.
In the economic sphere, one found a gamut of associations representing the interests of the most diverse sectors. There were associations of sugar growers, grocers, cobblers, coffee growers, in short, of all types of merchants and manufacturers. Even those who sold fermented sugar cane juice were organized; the National Association of Cane Juice Merchants, which represented 700 cane liquor dealers, was very active.
These economic associations shared one characteristic: they were inter-class groupings. They included everyone and at least said they represented everyone's interests. In practice it wasn't quite like that. An example: the members of the National Association of Colonos--who were cane growers linked to some central sugar refinery--ranged from the largest landowners to sugar workers who didn't even have two nickels to rub together. Anyone who produced sugar cane was a colono and therefore a member of the association. But it was obvious that the few large landowners dominated, and pulled the small and medium growers in only to create greater pressure on the state in defense of their own interests.
There was no state enterprise sector before the revolution as has since existed in more developed capitalist societies. But the Cuban state did maintain broad leadership over the economy starting in the 1930s. In that decade it created the Cuban Institute of Sugar Stabilization, since sugar was the country's leading industry. And based on that experience, other stabilization institutes with similar mechanisms of rigorous state control were created in the 1940s and 1950s for tobacco, coffee and all other export production.
When the revolution came, it drastically changed the panorama in society's economic sphere. It reduced private initiative to a minimum and expanded the existing state leadership to exercise state control over the whole economy from a socialist perspective. All private manufacturing became state-owned. The only area left private was some peasant production, which in many cases later cooperativized. Some small private enterprise in the commercial and service area--repair shops, small restaurants, juice stands, etc.--functioned until 1968, when they were also converted to state ownership. It was a radical revolutionary offensive that, though politically justified at the moment, was questionable in economic terms, because it meant the total loss of a business culture. Today Cuba must "rediscover" how to organize even the production and distribution of fermented cane juice.
The inter-class economic associations fell apart by themselves. Why? Because of the conversion to a state economy; because inter-class notions were mowed down by class struggle; but mostly because the large landowners or businessmen who led this or that association went into exile.
Before the revolution there were also political associations linked to various of the existing parties. And there were numerous religious associations, in response to the gamut of heartfelt beliefs among Cuba's people. After the revolution came, the parties disappeared and the religious associations lost their presence and their way, weakened by the profound ideological changes for which they were unprepared.
The most abundant organizations of civil society before the revolution were what were called "free associations." They were of all types and for all ends. Various professional associations--of doctors, journalists, engineers, etc.--had influence and organization. The immigrant associations were also very cohesive and had economic weight, especially the Spanish: Asturians, Gallegos, Canarians, Catalonians.
The spectrum of free associations was totally transformed with the revolution. Some associations were weakened, others disappeared. As happened in the economic sphere, all the pre-revolutionary professional associations fell apart when their leaders and a large number of their members went into exile. In the first three years of the revolution, 600,000 people left Cuba, primarily for the United States. The bulk of them were professionals: doctors, architects, university professors and the like.
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ANAPThe National Association of Small Producers is one of the Cuban system's eight mass organizations (organizaciones de masas), and is made up of some 150,000 agricultural producers and their families. It was founded in 1961 to represent the interests of small private landholders in the framework of a massively state-run agricultural economy, and in response to the revolution's first great transformation in the economy: agrarian reform. ANAP, with its new perspective, replaced the National Association of Colonos and had its own antecedent in the pre-revolutionary Congress of Armed Peasants. In 1975 ANAP led the process to form agricultural production cooperatives. Until then only credit and service cooperatives had been formed. Cooperativization was voluntary and cooperative members remained within ANAP.
Among the mass organizations, ANAP has been the most able to build solid links with the international NGOs that cooperate with Cuba. In 1996, joint ANAP-NGO projects in food security, sustainable agriculture, training, etc., represented $8 million.
"ANAP is the organization that is working most creatively on decentralization (decentralización), so necessary for Cuba's projects to be efficient, make better use of resources and encourage community participation," I was told by the representative of an international NGO that works with ANAP.
"Why is ANAP the most decentralized?" I ask a Cuban Communist Party militant. "I think it's because these people produce food, not ideology like other organizations. When food is urgently needed, things get resolved more easily."
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Arquitectos de la comunidad (Community Architects) There are many recent and novel experiences on the map of Cuban civil society. Those who seek, find. One of them is Community Architects, a project given priority by the Cuban NGO Habitat-Cuba since 1993 and supported by various international NGOs.
There are more than 300 community architects and they can now be found in all the island's provinces and over 100 of its 168 municipalities. They have already worked with 22,000 families, analyzing and resolving their housing problems with them. They build new houses, fix up old ones, adapt them to ever more extended families, distribute the space more effectively, multiply, divide... They construct "for the people," taking their needs and their dreams into account. A great majority of the projects culminate with what they call the Final Dream House (CFD, Casa Final Deseada). The housing problem is the most urgent issue Cuban society faces today.
Community Architects was inspired by the participatory design method of Argentine architect Rodolfo Livingston, who began to work in Holguín in 1994. The novelty of this association is not just the quality of its professionals, who include engineers, psychologists and sociologists, but also the horizontal methodology (metodología) it uses to relate to the population. In Cuba, horizontal relations are tremendously novel.
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=> Asociación (derecho) (Association, Right of)The Cuban Constitution recognizes the right of association. But the same constitutional text restricts this, and any other civil and political right if it works against the revolution. The point of debate--which is hardly debated at all in Cuba--is how to interpret "works against the revolution." In reality, the state does the interpreting and at its own discretion, because there are no rules or legal explanations to apply to the different cases that might be presented. Given this, individual rights--the right of association and others--end up in the hands of the officials who administer the law. Though legality is never violated, the legitimacy of the principle of "defense of the revolution" can be eroded depending on whether the law's interpretation and administration are lucid or torpid.
The aggressiveness of nine consecutive US administrations against the revolutionary project has obliged Cuba's leaders and all of its society to live in a permanently defensive posture. Defensiveness is not a good adviser. In its name the leaders have taken and continue to take measures that are not always popular and are at times badly applied, creating an illusion that they have the situation under control. But the people's consciousness remains many times out of that control. Many of the possibilities for Cuban civil society must be placed within this framework of imposed defense.
All Cubans have been and are associated in various social spaces. But the current crisis has diminished this in practice, because people are too busy with the problems of daily survival to remain actively organized. And those who do have limited participation (participación) because of the excessive centralization to which almost all decisions are now subjected. But the important changes that have taken place in Cuba in recent years are also moving society toward forming new kinds of associations. Many are spontaneous or informal and arise more in neighborhoods and local and communal spaces. But as one person in a neighborhood explained to me, "The thing is that, sooner or later, new experiences conflict with some official, some security freak, someone who says no, that's not authorized. And that's where the struggle lies, that's the struggle we have before us."
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=> Asociaciones profesionales (Professional Associations)The panorama of Cuban civil society isn't just occupied by the mass organizations (organizaciones de masas), those eight huge trees that provide shade here and there for their eleven million members. The social forest is more populated.
As the revolution's educational achievements advanced, new professionals emerged in all fields. In the 1980s the professional associations made a vigorous reappearance, by decree. The government began remaking them because it considered them to be "in the public interest." All of these associations--of lawyers, economists, journalists (UPEC), writers and artists (UNEC), etc.--are registered in the Civil Code. Though they were born "from above"--the system needed them--they also responded to a reality that was already demanding them "from below."
A professional is free to join an association or not but, as with the mass organizations, there's no choice: any professional who wants to associate with colleagues has only one association in his or her field in which to do so. In addition to being linked to a work center, and therefore to a union, more and more Cubans are also associated by profession. These associations serve for discussing common problems, exchanging ideas and simply getting together.
In general, the professional associations do not yet have a visible or significant impact on society, or notable leadership. "In practice," it was explained to me, "this is because the tendency is to act as a specialized mass organization so it doesn't move beyond that for anything, beyond promoting among its members the tasks the political system assigned it."
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=> Asociaciones civiles (Civil Associations)In the mid-1980s, the government encouraged--or permitted--society to begin forming new associations "from below." The official term is "civil associations."
Plurality in Cuban society was not yet sufficiently representative in either the huge mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) or the specialized professional associations (asociaciones profesionales). The Law of Associations (Law 54) was passed in 1985, and two years later the Civil Code recognized new associative forms. Today a National Registry of Associations is attached to the Ministry of Justice.
The civil associations grew slowly at first, and then with the crisis of the 1990s they multiplied much more rapidly. Today some 2,200 associations are registered in Cuba, the majority of them formed since the "special period." According to 1996 Ministry of Justice data, almost half of these are fraternal-philosophical: 420 Masonic Lodges, 317 Gentlemen of the Light fraternities, 354 Odd-Fellows Lodges and 10 others of this sort. The other half consists of 392 sports associations, 363 varied social interest groups, ranging from culinary to ornithological to philatelic, 158 scientific and technical groups, 143 friendship and solidarity organizations and 46 cultural groups. Two hundred of these are nation-wide. The approval of new civil associations has been limited since February 1996 due to the intensification of the US economic war against Cuba and the subsequent hardening of Cuba's domestic policies.
For a civil association to come into being, a minimum of 30 interested people may propose by-laws and solicit the state to legally register the association, just like any county in the world. And just like any Cuban process, it has its peculiarities. In addition to the legal recognition granted by the Justice Ministry--a mechanism, like all mechanisms in Cuba, noted for its slowness--the state submits the proposal to another control mechanism: the association must also get a green light from the state organization in the sphere related to the new association. The Cuban Philosophy Society, for example, needed the approval not only of the Justice Ministry but also of the Academy of Science. The Philatelic Society received its second approval from the Ministry of Communication. The various ecological associations were authorized by the Environmental Ministry.
Another problem is that the state institutions have their own idea of what an association's by-laws should be. Some associations have not been approved because of this centralist myopia.
In Cuba's irreversible process of opening to the international scene in recent years, some 50 civil associations have been evolving that call themselves nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (ONGs). They function as counterparts of international NGOs to develop joint projects, which is the only way to get and manage financial resources independent of the state channels.
** (In a later article we will talk about the relationship of Cuban society to international NGOs, mostly from Europe and Canada.)
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Asociaciones ilegales (Illegal Associations)An illegal association in Cuba is synonymous with a dissident political group, just as all associations that have been legalized are synonymous with social groups that accept the revolutionary political order.
An example of an illegal association with political goals is Concilio Cubano, mentioned by the wire services in the days before the Brothers to the Rescue planes were shot down (February 24, 1996). There are also other groups, more or less well-known depending on the case but all marginal to society's real dynamics. The illegal political associations are in many ways artificially constructed. The over 100 "associations" that make up Concilio Cubano don't even have 10 members each, which does not stop some international media from always exaggerating this organization.
Another group of illegal associations also often mentioned in the international media, perhaps because of collegiality, is the "independent journalists." They, too, are political groups, which express their dissidence through the journalist profession. The paucity of debate promoted by the Cuban media (medios de comunicación), so tediously officialist for decades, has prepared the ground for the "independents," who write and speak according to guidelines from the equally tedious counterrevolutionary media in Miami's Cuban community.
Many of the illegal associations receive outside advice or, even if they don't, the government suspects they do. All of them applied to be civil associations at some point. All went through the legal hoops, were rejected and so became "illegal." They tend to locate in private houses, which frees them from renting illegally. Once installed, they have won if the state permissively lets them exist. They have won even more if it is repressive and harasses them, because they get more publicity outside of Cuba. The more an illegal association links itself to US policy, the more control is exercised against it.
Inside Cuba the echo of illegal associations is inaudible, and not only because of censorship or fear of Castro's dungeons, as some might think. Anyone who goes to Cuba quickly discovers that dissatisfied people, those who criticize, disagree with or even reject the political system--people in all areas of revolutionary society, including within the Communist Party--do not feel represented in the positions of these dissident groups.
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=> Autonomía (Autonomy)The revolution initiated what it called the rectification period in the mid-1980s, in which the lack of creativity of the mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) was critiqued. They were accused of having fallen into routines, of having converted unity (unidad) into false unity. "From above" the state (estado) and the party (partido) encouraged the popular organizations' autonomy and proposed some changes. But it's hard to break routines from within routine.
Since then, the crisis, the scarcity of resources, the new questions, the boredom of old answers, the international links that the Cuban economy has had to make in order to survive, have all very slowly initiated the building of greater autonomy "from below" in society and its organizations, whether large, medium or small.
Foreign observers or officials of international NGOs who come to Cuba to work with its civil society can fall into a trap if they decide to select the associations they will study or work with by measuring their level of autonomy from the state, emphasizing their "nongovernmental" aspect. "What does nongovernmental mean in a country with a state tradition?" an international NGO director commented to me. "Wouldn't a better criterion for evaluation be the concept the associations have of participation, and above all, how they promote community participation?" The board of this NGO tries to use this yardstick, and avoid the other trap.
A challenge that the revolution has not yet taken up is autonomy from what is not state but is public. The Cuban project's initial mold didn't take this dimension into account. It also hasn't taken into account autonomy in the most private sphere there is: the sphere of personal opinions, dreams and desires. A friend of mine, who as a theater professional is an expert in "masks," explained it to me like this: "In Cuba," she said, "we are accustomed to always repressing our first thought about anything, our true opinions about any issue. We have been developing a self-restricting culture. This creates a shell and tends to make people grey, to make cookie-cutter people who hide their passions, who have no definition. Not even our desires are autonomous. We were educated with the idea that the subjective is bad; that desire, whether small, medium or large, is an expression of individualism, and we blame ourselves for autonomous desires that are born in our heart. We don't give them a chance, we always silence them, in order to serve the collective cause, a cause greater than ourselves."
As she explained this to me, I was remembering that nostalgic song by Cuban Carlos Varela: "I know that they are not great things/but they are my dreams/those small dreams/that help me to live..." It's interesting. Latin American protest songs have reclaimed the land, the indigenous, the right to life and not to live in cardboard houses. Cuban protest songs today demand the right to be wrong, to risk, to dream private, autonomous dreams that may differ from the "official" dream.
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B
=> Bicicleta (Bicycle)The Cuban system was designed to function like a bicycle wheel: a hub of force, of power that, through the party-state, its spokes, sends decisions and tasks out to the rim, to society. Any point of the wheel rim is the same distance from the hub, from whence all movement emanates. And any point only moves when the center moves. No spoke can move by itself, nor can it move any other spoke, because there are no mechanisms that join the spokes directly to each other.
Despite this rigidity, Cuban citizens who have grown up with the revolution have organized throughout their lives in outlets for social participation (participación) that are more numerous and more significant than citizens had before the revolution. And since the bicycle has never functioned like a perfect machine and sometimes its chain breaks or gets slack, new social experiences are emerging in Cuba today. One of the challenges of Cuban civil society today is that those new experiences be shared and interchanged. The challenge is horizontal: get the wheel spokes to touch each other.
C
=> Carril 2 (Track Two)The US government proposed Track Two in 1992 in the text of the Torricelli Law, which hardened the blockade against Cuba. It was proposed more openly in 1994, during the first administration of President William Clinton. Track Two represents a shift in US policy toward Cuba: after 30 years of exclusive and systematic use of aggression and harassment, the United States proposes to also work along another track; to make cultural, professional and family contacts and exchanges between Cuba and the United States more fluid. The central objective of those who advocate Track Two is to promote "civil society" in Cuba--which they consider to be non-existent--in order for that society to confront the government, destabilize it and ultimately replace it.
Fidel Castro spoke of Track Two for the first time on July 26, 1995, noting its dangerous nature. In March 1996, at the moment of greatest US-Cuba tensions after the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes and Clinton's signing of the Helms-Burton Law, the V Plenary of the Politburo of the Cuban Communist Party's Central Committee noted in a report that, though the blockade had been tightened to the extreme through Helms-Burton, Track Two was not discarded and continued to be open. Its goal, said the report, is "to sow confusion, lack of faith and discord and to fragment the Cuban people in order to create discontent, peaceful resistance and eventually disorders that offer the most extremist Yankee circles a pretext for military actions."
The hardening of US policy toward Cuba in 1996 caused an ideological hardening in Cuba's internal policies, justified by Track Two. One sector of Cuban leadership--which today dominates the strategic ideological spaces--suspects, fears or detects in the counterproposals, in some Cuban and international NGOs, in intellectual centers, in the owners of small private restaurants, in a comedian and his routines, in a visit, in a project, in a written passage...Track Two. And acts accordingly.
This has created a great contradiction: an attempt to close ideological doors and windows at the very moment that economic doors and windows are opening to insert Cuba into the world. Albeit this globalized world, because of current capitalist and US hegemony, is all one big Track Two. "Track Two, in addition to being a real danger for Cuba, has become the greatest excuse for the hardliners," a friend commented. "It is an obsession; now everything can be Track Two. Track Two has been converted into a concept as ungraspable yet omnipresent as when Americans talk about Evil."
Another friend explained to me that the obvious economic recovery Cuba has slowly but surely been experiencing since 1995, as well as the immense capacity for resistance and austerity that Cuban society has demonstrated, has given space to those who use Track Two as their alibi. These "hardliners"--also called "talibanes" because of their fundamentalism and belligerence--draw from these two achievements of the people and the revolution the incorrect conclusion that they can postpone, even cancel, the changes that Cuban society is demanding today to improve socialist democracy.
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=> CDRRevolutionary Defense Committee. It is another of the eight mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) of the Cuban political system: the largest and most original, the one that best characterizes the beginning of revolutionary changes. The CDRs emerged in 1960, organizing blocks, neighborhoods and rural communities. The approach caught fire and by 1962 there were 100,000 CDRs throughout Cuba, involving one million Cubans, half the adult population. The CDRs today involve seven million people and have created a social network that is critical for all sorts of activities.
The "defense" of the revolution against counterrevolutionary sabotage or conspiratorial activities was the initial reason for forming the CDRs. But by mid-1960, a series of social and community activities were added to that initial task and ultimately took precedence. Today, although the CDRs continue to be called "revolutionary defense," the people see them more as a way to bring the neighborhood together, as a community organization that administers and distributes scarce resources, organizes birthday parties for children and send-off parties for young men going into military service, carries out vaccination campaigns and any number of other such activities. In some situations the CDRs have also been seen as havens for gossips who violate individual privacy. "Defense" is still maintained, but today it's directed fundamentally against delinquency.
Of all the mass organizations, the CDR has historically been the one with the greatest autonomy (autonomía), the one that has acted as a conveyor belt for the system's priorities and as a "fire extinguisher" for problems created by state policies. Despite this, communal space is probably the main space in which new organizational forms "outside of" or at least not led by the CDRs are gradually appearing. Numerous community experiences are being led by natural leaders, ad hoc commissions, etc., and the CDR has joined up with many of them.
As the fruit of its current renovation process, the CDRs have proposed recovering the cultural identities of their neighborhoods, forgotten for many years. Due to a renovation among the leadership, 70% of CDR leaders are now under 35. But after so many years of routine, "it's not enough to combine youth with good ideas," one person told me. In the view of many Cubans, an authentic renovation of the CDRs would require shaking off the rigid work styles and mechanical and boring meetings by incorporating participatory methodologies (metodologías).
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=> CTCCuban Workers' Central. Born in 1939, the CTC was one of the first unified and centralized workers' movements in Latin America. Even before the revolution, the majority of Cuban workers--mostly men--belonged to it. The Central survived the revolutionary changes and became one of the eight mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) of Cuba's political system. Today over 3 million workers, men and women, belong to the CTC.
Every day the economic situation in Cuba is more and more changed from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, when the economy was totally state-run and the state controlled market mechanisms almost totally. Today, there are embryos of small private enterprises, more and more mixed enterprises, free zones with assembly plants for re-export (maquiladoras), and an extensive cooperative system in agriculture, cattle and fishing. The state continues to have companies, is part of mixed ones with foreign investments and still regulates the economy through various organizations. The CTC is the mass organization most directly affected by such drastic changes, in which reality has been turned upside down for the Cuban worker.
The workers' movement will never be what it was before, when the union had only one "boss," the benevolent state. Today more and more people work for themselves, or in mixed enterprises--where the "bosses" are foreign capitalists. Even those who still work in state enterprises are being subjected to a regime of capitalist efficiency and profit never before practiced in Cuba, imposed by the globalized economy. In addition to all these changes, unemployment and underemployment have reared their ugly heads. They are totally new situations for the CTC.
This irreversible reality demands that the Cuban union movement be more representative, because the interests of its base aren't being resolved by the paternalist state. The state is no longer, and never will be again, the father who gives to the union; it is now the business partner who takes. It has had to do away with freebies, raise prices, accept inequalities, freeze wages, impose taxes... When the state gave workers everything, the union was almost a formality. It was only a political motivator for workers and a mechanism that allowed them certain participation in planning discussions, the application of the labor code or the promotion of labor discipline.
The CTC has begun a process of serious reflection about the new reality described in the "Thesis" of its XVII Congress of 1996, a document that, in the judgment of Cuban analysts, is the most ideologically advanced since the Call (Llama-miento) of the Cuban Communist Party's IV Congress in 1990. The most notable aspect of the "Thesis" is that it proposes an opening to pluralistic forms of work, in the awareness that the CTC should represent the diverse array of interests among Cuban workers today. "This isn't just new, it's really new," a leader in one work center explained to me. "Cuban society is going through profound changes. And the Thesis expresses the first reflections of workers about those changes." In other places they say that the fruit of that reflection isn't showing up anywhere, that it's only on paper. As a textile worker in San Antonio de los Baños put it: "I saw and I saw and I never see any sawdust. The union is the same today as yesterday; it only serves the adminstration, and does nothing for me."
The Cuban unions have before them a huge challenge to build and oil new tools. Even though the CTC is one of the most toughened mass organizations and one that has worked hardest for its base, its practice of litigating grievances and communicating demands is no longer enough. "What is the CTC's challenge? To me it's very clear," a young unionist expressed. "We must promote a union and unionists that defend popular participation. And defend it against the official project, which is far too purely administrative."
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Cuentapropistas (Free-Lancers)Self-employed workers sprang up because the state could no longer guarantee full employment. They appeared very late. After a lot of reticence, the door was opened to them when the violent incidents in the Malecón in August 1994 and the later raft crisis showed that Cubans' ability to resist hardship had its limits.
Today there are some 200,000 legalized free-lancers. They have small restaurants, repair watches or cars, are carpenters and plumbers, make souvenirs for tourists, sell food in the street, cut hair... A new "civil society" is emerging around them in the economic sphere. To these unexpected entrants into the traditional labor sphere must be added the thousands of illegal self-employed people--they pay no taxes and have no permit card--who make up a new sector similar to the "informal sector" that is so sizable throughout Latin America. Many of these are women who sell cheese or candy or fruits or anything else door to door, and have thus been baptized "free-doorers."
The sectors that work free lance are the most defenseless in Cuban society today, because they are treated with an ideological prejudice that is expressed through delays in authorizing them, then endless bureaucratic complications and limitations established by the legislation regulating their work. Norms and more norms are issued which, in addition to being strict, often remain under the control of organizations with interests contradictory to the workers. Often the norms are thus applied not only rigidly but arbitrarily. This negative attitude is based on a deeply rooted ideological premise: private initiative has within it the fatal germ of capitalism, and socialism is only fully guaranteed when all work is within the state. But capitalism has already come to Cuba and the social organization is already mixed. "Why are the capitalists from outside good and those inside bad?" one person asked. "Could it be because it's easier for the government to negotiate from a centralist place with a few powerful capitalists than with a lot of little half-pint capitalists?"
Including the family circle around the self-employed, Cuba today has about a million people with economic interests that contradict state interests: taxes, controls, norms, sometimes direct competition. Where do small restaurant owners and other self-employed defend their interests? Where do they debate the high taxes on their not always high earnings? Where do they negotiate favorable prices for the raw materials they need? Who represents them? Can they form associations? Everything indicates that they can't do so autonomously and that the CTC Thesis will prevail. It proposes that the Central move away from its proletarian habits to represent all of those who work, salaried or not, and thus that it be a place for the self-employed as well.
There is a possibility of incorporating a union of self-employed workers within the CTC, just as there is a sugar workers' union within it. Even though being unionized would give them social benefits and allow them to defend themselves better from the "illegals," the self-employed will likely see this type of union--within a single and very regimented Central--as another mechanism of state control. And they may be right. Many people who are self-employed are small proprietors who more or less openly hire workers. They would be hardput to feel represented by a trade union. By putting the accent on worker unity, without distinguishing between the self-employed and those who earn salaries from the state, the CTC, in the name of unity (unidad), is forcibly unifying interests that are actually very diverse.
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CH
Chicharrón (Pork Rind)This is what Cubans call someone who, in meetings, unconditionally supports everything that the Party or the authority speaking proposes. This person neither bats nor pitches nor catches. Every meeting in Cuba has its chicharrón.
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ChinaThere are those who say that the Cuban system sees its paradigm in the model of mainland China: strict control in the political-ideological sphere and flexibility in the economic sphere. A China specialist explained one of the reasons for the successful economic evolution of that Asian power this way: "The changes in China have not been green lights going on, but rather red lights going off." With that in mind, I then asked a Cubanologist from Old Havana, "Are Cubans' stoplights like those of the Chinese, or how is it here?" He responded without doubt: "Here? Forget it and deep six it. Every day there are more red lights!"
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D
=> DebateThere's no culture of debate in Cuba. "Is there debate in the home, in the family?" Yes, of course. "Is there debate in bars or on street corners?" Only if you know who's who and what side they're on... "Is there debate in the media (medios de comunicación)?" Listen to them and look at them. "Is there debate in the workplace, in the party?" Silence.
The lack of debate can be explained by the censorship policy. "There's a set of taboo issues that, if they're discussed at all, are always discussed under control, and if you go beyond that control, you're immediately called to order," a party militant explained.
Censorship has procreated a child: self-censorship. One of the most accused aspects of Cuban society is self-censorship. That characteristic, common throughout society, has infected all of its associations, which then reinforce it. Self-censored associations are less representative, because many concerns from the base never get to them. In general, one perceives that the leadership of the FMC, the women's mass organization, is less bold than its active base, which in turn is less bold than all other Cuban women. The same phenomenon is observed in the professional associations: the directorate of the economists' association is less bold than the economists associated with it and they are less bold than society as a whole in their economic demands. The chain of self-censorship is made of many links like that.
Cuba's current crisis tends to break the self-censorship culture but at the same time strengthens it in new ways. The criticisms that many Cubans today make of the political system sometimes sound extremely subtle, too indirect, timidly measured. No one wants to trigger a convulsion, everyone fears abrupt change. The immense majority feels that the revolutionary project belongs to them, which is why they suffer and are confused about what's going on: the double standard, inequalities, spaces that are closed to them but opened to none other than the hated representatives of international capitalism... "Seeing all of this, we censor ourselves," commented someone in a meeting. "Everything that's happening touches on our own history, since all of us have sacrificed for this revolution. And now? We feel like we're walking in a mine field knowing that each one of us planted the mines... Is it time to take them out? How to do it? No easy task! Everyone knows that it's harder to take out mines than to lay them."
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Democracia (Democracy)Democracy should be participatory and representative. Both require an educated and healthy population that decides and participates freely. The Cuban people are more than prepared to live both expressions of democracy.
To be real, participatory democracy should be distributed throughout the chain of power, all the way from the decision about what to do to the evaluation of what was done. There are mechanisms of participatory democracy in Cuba today that urgently need to be renovated.
Representative democracy is expressed in Cuba through the organs of Popular Power. Since 1992 people have been electing their closest representatives in these organs--the district delegate--in a direct and secret vote. With today's crisis of centrally exercised state paternalism (paternalismo)--because it no longer has resources to resolve Cuba's problems--the system proposed giving more power to the Popular Power Assemblies at all levels, from municipal assemblies to national ones. It also formed Popular Councils, which group delegates from various districts, and cut the distance between district and municipality. But in practice, state administrators and party officials have continued to impose their ideas on the elected delegates, who continue to be men and women without real power.
A district delegate confirmed this. "Is that how it is?" "That's exactly how it is. I think that in a short time no one will want to be a delegate and, if they're still elected, will have to be dragged to office. Look at me. I can't do anything, I can't solve anything and I have all the problems on top of me. They tell me not to give anything, just to give explanations and reasons. But I can't even convince myself of what I'm saying!"
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Decentralización (Decentralization)Decentralization is on the front page of Cuban society's agenda. Cuba's system has been characterized by excessive centralization within a pyramidal structure. Despite this, it functioned acceptably for a long time, as long as it received the backing of the USSR and the socialist countries. With this system, Cuba transformed itself and has resisted the US military, political and economic war. Not small feats.
The passage of time is unstoppable and today, Cuba has a developed society. It's an adult society with a lot of human capital. It's capable of autonomy (autonomía) and participation (participación), of finding solutions, of being a productive and creative force. But it finds itself blocked by the funneled spaces in which decisions are made. The only broad spaces are for fulfilling what has been decided. It was explained to me this way: "Here no one participates in the decision to plant potatoes, but we all have to participate in harvesting them!"
Since the clash with reality goes hand in hand with the passage of time, the crisis has contributed to disordering pyramids, funnels and bicycles (bicicletas), favoring some very healthy forms of decentralization and some communal forms of participation. Local problems are beginning to be resolved with local resources and in local spaces, a totally new focus in Cuba. "Get out of Havana," I was advised. "Get out of Havana and see the provinces. There are two Cubas: Havana and the interior. Sancti Spiritus is a different Cuba, Santa Clara is a different Cuba. In some places, there isn't so much scheming and things are beginning to function with less centralization."
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E
=> El estado (The State)The state's relationship to civil society shouldn't be confrontational any place in the world. It should be complementary and cooperative, because what unites the state to civil society is interest in the people, in the common good. If there is one place in Latin America where the foundation is laid for these harmonic relations, it's Cuba.
The task of civil society's organizations (unions, community, professional, religious, cultural, intellectual groups) is not the conquest of government nor is it profit. Thus they are competing neither with the state nor with the market. They move independently in both waters. In Latin America civil society is also called "the third sector." It's not the state sector nor the commercial sector, it's the community sector. A democratic alternative is emerging in this sector. Democratic because it promotes participation, and alternative because too much market kills the community aspect by suppressing individualism. Too much state also kills the community aspect because it squashes initiative and foments dependence.
Until very recently, almost everything in Cuba was state; there were virtually no market mechanisms. In the new situation growing out of the crisis, market mechanisms are being introduced and the state, though keeping itself strong with priority programs and privileged enterprises, is redefining its role in society without really wanting to. Because of these changes, civil society is almost imperceptibly making itself felt more. It's emerging from the heart of the society that forged the revolution and is dressed in the peculiarities of Cuban culture and history.
Within the Cuban government there's a reticence to understand and accept this new reality, which calls upon the state to pass powers to society, to redistribute power. To those who identify socialism with the state, the new situation is a tough challenge.
Within the international market--especially the part of it dominated by the United States--there are interests in forming a civil society in Cuba to confront the state and force it to give all power to the market. To those who identify the market with democracy, Cuba's new reality represents a great temptation for its interfering tendencies.
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F
La familia (The Family)The revolutionary project created material conditions in Cuba that strengthened the family: health, education, jobs, social security for all. But at the same time it weakened the family by minimizing its spiritual role in the transmission of the "new society's" values and entrusting that transcendental task to state entities. This double action has left indelible marks on Cuba's social fabric, on all Cubans of all ages.
Over the years, the state's initial opinion of the family changed. Today, state and society, official discourse and generalized culture all insist that there is no education or spirit or values unless the family, both father and mother, participate in that task. The problem is that now, just when the family's spiritual role has been restored, it is once again facing very difficult material conditions which the state is not resolving: getting enough food is a daily concern; salaries are too low; there's unemployment; housing problems abound, provoking lack of privacy and overcrowding; the elderly population in families is growing, etc.
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FEEMFederation of Secondary Students. It is one of the eight mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) of the political system, and includes over half a million students. Its antecedent is the Union of Secondary Students (UES), the first specifically student organization created by the revolution (1962). The UES headed massive coffee picking campaigns for four years, as well as organizing forums in all schools called "How to study more and better." These activities of both manual labor and intellectual formation left an unerasable memory in the generation that participated in them. The methodology of joining work with studies, although it continues to be employed, no longer has that initial transformational impact.
After an organizational gap in the student sector, FEEM was created at the end of the 1960s to mobilize secondary students to fulfill tasks assigned to them by the revolution. Membership in FEEM is practically mechanical, and compared to its predecessors, the UES, or the Association of Rebel Youth even before that, it doesn't have the same vitality. Renovating FEEM is related to finding creative projects for adolescents and providing more adequate responses to the generational problems of the Cuban family (familia).
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FEUUniversity Student Federation. Founded in 1923 by Communist student leader Julio Antonio Mella in the fight to overthrow the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, it was one of the pre-revolutionary civil society associations with the highest level of organization and combativeness and enjoyed great prestige and influence in the country. It was a cradle of rebellion and reflection that formed various generations of political leaders, among them Fidel Castro himself.
The FEU survived the revolutionary changes and is one of the eight mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) of Cuba's political system. It includes almost all of the 200,000 university students, because entering the university and joining the FEU is almost a single step if they want to participate in a series of academic and political activities and enjoy all their rights as students.
The FEU has maintained a notable vitality. University students, above all in Havana, have always been at the forefront of society in the most difficult moments for the nation and the revolution. "Really, the FEU is more vital than the UJC," a Cuban Communist Party (PCC) militant told me, comparing the FEU with the youth branch of the party. Cuba's university students represent various intellectual positions, as in any country. They range from passionate defenders of the revolution to the staunchest dissidents, covering the gamut of critical support in between.
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=> FMCFederation of Cuban Women, one of the eight mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) in Cuba's system. Founded in 1960, today it includes some 3 million women over 14, 85% of all Cuban women.
In the 1960s, the FMC was, in the judgment of many, the most revolutionary organization in Cuba's history because it carried out transcendental and crucial tasks: it promoted literacy and studies among peasant women, created and maintained child care centers throughout the country to allow women to join the work force, promoted an end to prostitution, revised laws to guarantee equal opportunities for women, etc.
As Cuban women joined all the social, economic, political and cultural tasks of the revolution, creating conditions for their equality with men--especially in the legal and labor areas--and winning their basic rights, they outgrew the FMC's clothes. Thanks to the revolution and to the FMC's own work, it must be said, women diversified more and had ever more pluralist interests. "In the 1960s, the FMC's task was women," commented an FMC member. "But in the 1980s that didn't mean very much any more. What women? Doctors? Cooperative members? Divorced? Single mothers who are heads of family? In the 1990s, the term woman no longer means anything; it's a concept that no longer exists in this Cuban reality."
The FMC didn't know how to adjust to the accelerated social evolution it had promoted, and continued to maintain some of its traditional training tasks, especially in the rural area, while it resisted accepting the goals of the feminist struggle. Today, it has not yet accepted the gender (género) perspective. Neither yesterday nor today has it proposed to fight against cultural machismo, always present and now aggravated by the economic crisis. Because it didn't renovate itself, its clothes no longer fit. In 1990, on the occasion of the preparatory debate for the IV Congress of the Communist Party, opinions of the FMC were particularly critical and a good number of members actually asked for it to be dissolved.
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G
Género (Gender)The revolutionary gender perspective now fills libraries, is a permanent theme of congresses and workshops and has taught women in all parts of the world to look at themselves and society through new eyes. In Cuba the gender perspective is still not present in a significant way. What is "feminine" was dissolved into what is "social" and today the system tends to limit "the gender perspective" in the name of "the national and revolutionary unity perspective."
The FMC doesn't accept the gender perspective because the Communist Party doesn't accept it and there are no signs of its doing so. However, the maturity of Cuban women reached through the revolution permits a prognosis that the gender vision will open a path in society. Though not without obstacles. The FMC leadership has not only avoided entering this area of reflection and action, but has prevented some of its base from doing so. It deactivated--that was the term used--the group of women communicators called Magín, when the FMC and party (partido) leadership ordered it to dissolve in September 1996. The women working in Magín had presented the word gender in society, and for three years worked creatively with this perspective in various areas.
A machista culture pervades in Cuba, and is as difficult to uproot as cultural racism, which also still exists. "But I think that the revolution has more responsibility with respect to machismo than to racism," a seemingly enlightened young man on the subject of gender explained to me, "because slavery is too deeply rooted in our history. And the case of machismo was easier. The reality is that, after all the women left their homes and achieved so much in the first years, they were left there. What left them there? They cut their wings so they couldn't fight for more!" But then the young man stopped to ponder for a moment, after which he blurted out, "This isn't the cutting of wings or anything like that! Everyone knows that there are lots of women and they are tremendous when they make demands. And here we can't risk losing unity. Or else, they'll cut off something else!"
** (In a later article we'll talk more about women and the gender perspective in Cuba.)
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H
Hilo (Thread)There's a Cuban legend that a sparrow didn't want to be caged in and decided to stop eating in order to get thin enough to squeeze through the bars of its cage. It didn't work. Its leg was tied to the cage with thread so it couldn't escape. But the sparrow, who was decisive and continued with determination, threw himself to die in a corner until it was stiff as a stick. So they way in Cuba that no thread works with a sparrow, because no sparrow will live or sing in a cage.
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I
Iglesias (Churches)The Catholic Church in Cuba coexists with some 50 Protestant denominations. None of the Christian churches "dominates" either in society or in the religiosity of the Cuban people, who easily accept any belief and mix them all up to live with more spirit. "Like a good stew," a priest explained to me. Beliefs in Santería, religions of African origin mixed with expressions of Catholicism, have always dominated in the well-known Cuban religious eclecticism.
In the opinion of Cubans in Miami who support US policy, the Catholic Church is the only real space for civil society on the island today. Thus it often proposes that the Church take on the role of the "made in USA" civil society model they want for Cuba.
** (In a later article we'll talk about religion and the role of religious institutions in Cuban society.)
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J
José MartíJosé Martí was an apostle of socio-diversity, though in his time no one called it that. Martí dreamed of a pluralist society for Cuba, one that would add to and not suppress, one in which everyone's ideas could be expressed, even if tumultuously. To get from those ideas the hidden truth. That's what he spoke about over 100 years ago in his famous speech of November 26, 1891, in Tampa. We are seeking, Martí said, "a republican country, without the feeble fear of some toward the healthy expression of all ideas and the honest employment of all energies.... Of course those dandies of politics will abandon us, those who forget that it is necessary to recognize what cannot be suppressed; and there will be grumbling about the patriotism of rice dust, under the pretext that the people, in the sweat of creation, don't always smell sweet. And what should we do about it? Truthfully, you have to go in with your shirt rolled up to the elbow, like the butcher goes into the steer. Everything true is saintly, even if it doesn't smell sweet."
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K
Key WestSouthernmost point of US territory, closest point to Cuba, where it is known by the name Cayo Hueso. For many years it was the first horizon of the "promised land" for thousands of raft people who survived the sharks and the hazardous waters of the Florida straits, and when they arrived were the only Latin emigrants privileged with a welcome from the US government.
On May 12, 1997, Susie Maroney, a 22-year-old Australian swimmer, covered the 174 kilometers that separate Havana's sea wall from the coasts of this key in 24.5 hours. Susie returned exhausted and abraded by the corrosive contact with her traveling companions, hundreds of jellyfish, but she arrived happy. She had made a colossal effort to win a record. She also swam that distance to demonstrate in an original way how close Cuba and the United States really are, and how close the two societies, the great country of the North and the small Caribbean island, should be; to show that they are neighbors whose governments could come to respect their differences.
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L
Laboratorio (Laboratory)José Antonio Blanco, founder of the Felix Varela Center, one of Cuba's newest NGOs, has on several occasions put forward the hypothesis that the island is a social laboratory. He explains it in his "Letter to a European Friend," published in the new Cuban magazine Contracorriente: "Cuba cannot--if it hopes to survive--be the museum of an extinct socialism, but neither can it be the pastiche of the Latin American tragedy. Despite the crisis, Cuba has the human and material potential to constitute a successful social laboratory for a new paradigm of authentic and sustainable human development. If it is possible to 'reinvent' socialism somewhere, this island has the conditions for it.... The path to our solutions passes through a broad and pluralist debate that would revive the rectification process, search for a new integral and coherent development model that can become an alternative to both the Soviet model and the capitalist reality, with a genuine democratic and humanist nature in the framework of a mixed economy.... It is from the fullest autonomous and participatory incorporation of civil society in political society that a new and genuine democratic culture will emerge."
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LL
Llamamiento (Call)In 1990, with the Cuban crisis echoing the fall of European socialism, the Communist Party of Cuba (Partido Comunista) convoked a new Congress for 1991. It did so by massively distributing a text titled "The Call to the IV Congress." This text was historical and lucid, and sparked a massive debate throughout the population, not just among members of the PCC.
The array of suggestions made during this debate was a clear sign of the maturity of Cuban men and women, who with total freedom assessed the reality and the stumbling blocks in their path toward a more advanced society. The results of the discussion of that Call make up the agenda of Cuban society and represent the most complete opinion poll (opinión pública) available to the political system today.
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M
Medios de comunicación (The Media)In Cuba, all written, broadcast or televised mass media are part of the political system, are indispensable pieces of it. This has permitted them to play a transcendental role in both stellar moments of the revolution and in its exceptional and emergency situations. But the media have also been characterized by a stunning mediocrity in their day-to-day reporting.
The Cuban media--with the exception of film--have not helped create the culture of debate that any society demands and that is more urgent in a society in crisis. Cuban society knows how to speak and the crisis is causing it to speak louder. Some sectors of power don't hear it; others hear but have no answers; and then there are those who hear and have answers, but no power to act. How to undo all of these and other knots? One key would be to open up debate. The media are called upon to convert themselves into a permanent forum of debate. It is argued that doing so would open them to the risk of a downhill slide into "democratism." But the issue isn't debating for the sake of debate, or mental calisthenics, or a superfluous exercise. It's about a debate to create awareness and above all, to find among all people the best solutions to the problem.
Although some timid steps are being taken to open debate in some local radios, some national radios, in the weeklies Trabajadores and Juventud Rebelde, in some articles of the magazine Bohemia, in certain television programs, there is not yet either an opening or a style that matches the proportion of the Cuban crisis. I watched one TV program that signaled progress: "Lens on the Capital," on Friday, February 28 at 6 pm. The issue: some youths going through Havana's streets wearing shorts, shirts, hats, entire outfits with the US flag on them. The question for debate: how to interpret it? should a flag be used as a fashion motif? and what if it was the Cuban flag? It's a juicy theme. The program has an attractive one-hour format: a panel of several people in the studio, edited street surveys and live calls from the public. Although no one expresses an opinion favorable to the United States or any other really strident one, there is a gamut of opinions, avoiding the habitual Cuban "debate" in which the discussion is not so much about what is happening as what should happen. One of the studio participants goes the farthest: "Was real socialism ever able to impose some fashion, some hairstyle? We've been obstinate in this and have to reflect about our inability to attract youth. The United States are too good at imposing their symbols..."
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Metodología (Methodology)In the first years of the revolution, work was successfully done with participatory methodologies for social diagnosis and project implementation. In the field of community housing construction, for example. These methodologies became less popular in the 1970s as Cuba began to copy the rigid Soviet model. Today, the methods for meetings, forums, Congresses, events, seminars, panels, for all the many such gatherings that take place in Cuba, are excessively traditional, top-down, boring. There's a growing awareness that things don't work well that way, that community doesn't grow that way and that, even more important, problems don't get solved that way.
Another methodology of work and reflection is perhaps what's missing in Cuban society today in order to advance more rapidly. Cuba needs to appropriate its own version of the rich Latin American practice of popular education. Those who know Cuba know that disseminating and practicing participatory (participación) methodologies that break with self-censorship and with the culture of waiting--waiting for orders, waiting for solutions--would be a revolution within the revolution. I had the opportunity to witness this when observing one of the popular education workshops sponsored by the Martin Luther King Center, a Cuban NGO. The center has been offering these workshops for three years to professionals and community activists to turn them into popular educators. The experience is still small, but as promising as the biblical mustard seed.
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N
Negros y negras (Afro-Caribbeans)Over a third of the Cuban population is black, the grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren of Africans brought as slaves. Cuba was one of the last Latin American countries to abolish slavery. One of the central discrepancies between the first independent Cubans and the colonial metropolis was the ethical indignation of a sector of Cuban society at Spain's promotion of slavery. This fight to liberate the blacks, which filled the 19th century, is at the root of Cuban national identity, part of what is best of Cuban society's "soul."
The Cuban revolution was faithful to this root and opened all opportunities to the Afro-Caribbean population in a gigantic expression of humanism. In pre-revolutionary Cuba there had been many borders that Black Cubans were not permitted to cross. They couldn't go to Catholic schools--they weren't even admitted if they could pay--and were restricted from beaches, restaurants, the university, the workplace, everywhere. The revolution pulled down all those barriers.
Today there are no longer dividing lines, but racism still persists in the culture, establishing mental boundaries in the hearts of many Cubans, including government leaders and officials, that are hard to overcome. The black population is also still not sufficiently represented in the power structures, and less so as one goes up the pyramid.
Despite all this, there is less cultural racism in Cuba than ever before. And thanks to the revolution there is something new: an educated and aware black population, well-equipped to fight for itself against racism. Uncovering cultural racism is one of the most important, impassioned and daily tasks that Cuban civil society has before it.
The counterrevolutionary organizations in Miami, made up of whites, are obviously racist, and not just culturally. Their racism is so evident that theoreticians of these groups are forced to recognize it: "Black participation is crucial in the opposition and democracy project and there is a need for efforts to recruit blacks for the advancement of civil society," one of them wrote.
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No!
"No, man! Here they're talking so much trash, get prepared for the clubbing!"
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O
=> ONGs (NGOs)In no part of the world should civil society be considered synonymous with NGOs, the nongovernmental organizations that depend on voluntary cooperation, national or international funding. They do play a role of strengthening civil society, but they don't substitute for it. Nor should they substitute for the state in its social policies. They should be neither a mask for civil society nor an aspirin for the neoliberal state. NGOs work to strengthen the community. If they achieve it, they contribute to real progress, because a stronger community can democratize the state and the market.
The NGO concept came to Cuba later than to the rest of Latin America. It came abruptly and is still not well understood. In the state, suspicions abound. In the street, few people have heard the word and when they do, they associate it with "donations."
The Cuban government--which, with good reason, does not accept that the "nongovernmental" essence of NGOs must be, should be, or is synonymous with "anti-government"--has on occasion called all Cuban social organizations NGOs: the mass organizations born in the 1960s, the professional ones strengthened in the 1980s and the civil ones that have proliferated in the 1990s. Despite this formal and opportunistic "christening," however, some state sectors are still suspicious of the term NGO.
The list of Cuban NGOs is still as imprecise as the definition itself. Among Cuba's over 2,000 civil associations (asociaciones civiles), some 50 are organized as NGOs and about 30 of them--with the participation of mass organizations like ANAP or FMC--have created a new space for reflection and meeting that they call the Cuban Nongovernmental Community. The dividing lines are confused and the classifications depend a lot on interpretation. Cuba has civil associations that recognize themselves as NGOs and already existed before the revolution, like the Association of Sugar Technicians (ATAC), and others that haven't even been around five years.
The nongovernmental component of NGOs creates antibodies in the Cuban political system. Some officials insist on associating it with anti-governmental, which intensifies rejection and suspicions. Others, though sustaining that only pro-governmental organizations can exist and deny society its autonomy in practice, opportunistically mask some organizations as NGOs in order to obtain international resources, links or presence.
The changing reality of Cuba and the reality of national and international NGOs in Cuba require reflection, experience, time, practice, legislative revisions to establish rights and responsibilities, a new political, social, financial culture, etc. According to the party (partido), it requires an immediate reordering. And that's going on. A discussion about NGOs has been pending in the Cuban Parliament for two years because some political sectors don't know they exist, others don't understand their importance and still others reject their role, simplistically identifying them as imperialist Trojan horses or with Genaro's most native mule, from which nothing can be expected "but a kick in the behind."
The NGO issue has created and is creating tensions. According to a leader of one of the most active Cuban NGOs, this is positive. "If there were no tensions, that would mean it's very easy. And whatever is very easy in a socialist project still marked by Soviet fingerprints smacks of manipulation. Better to have tensions and contradictions, because they mean we're alive. And if we're alive, forget it! This process of opening doors can't go backwards."
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Opinión Pública (Public Opinion)The Cuban system doesn't recognize public opinion as a political and social phenomenon and doesn't take that opinion into account when making policy. The government does polls and surveys, but its results are always confidential. Society lacks the means to know what the public is really thinking. In a discussion like the one in 1990 caused by the Call (Llamamiento) to the IV Communist Party Congress, the society that participated so actively never knew the overall results. Not even the PCC militants learned of them so they could analyze them.
In a model like that, public opinion can't fulfill one of its main objectives. It can't help society either know where it is or which way to move; it can't help society either strengthen or overcome positions, or its conduct, or reflect... "I'd like to know," I was told, "if five people or five thousand think like I do. I'd like to know if I'm on track or totally off the wall. But I'll never know that, I have no way of knowing that."
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=> Organizaciones de masas (Mass Organizations)
They are the matrix of civil society in Cuba today, the starting point for understanding what exists and what's missing. When most of society's associations before the revolution (antes de la revolución) disappeared, there was a vacuum. From the first moment and throughout the years, this vacuum was filled by new organizations. First, by the mass, or popular organizations. Later, by professional associations (asociaciones profesionales) and a broad gamut of civil associations (asociaciones civiles).
There are eight large mass organizations in Cuba, born or renovated with the revolution. They are recognized in the Constitution, where they were individually named until 1991. In one way or another, these organizations gathered under their umbrellas all of the country's social sectors. Practically no one was left out. Nobody wanted to be left out, because joining them was a sign of identity. Everyone was organized and everyone wanted to be organized: urban and rural workers in the CTC, women in the FMC, neighbors in the CDRs, peasants in ANAP, university students in the FEU, secondary students in the FEEM and primary students in the Pioneers Union.
None of these organizations was born full blown, but the huge popular support for the revolution and their own inclusive character led them to become truly mass organizations. The only mass organization not born in that first revolutionary hour is the Association of Combatants of the Revolution, created in the 1980s, which includes veterans of historic military campaigns in the Sierra Maestra, Bay of Pigs and Escambray in Cuba, or in Africa.
The Cuban mass organizations have a national character, are unique and are inclusive. They don't oblige anyone or reject anyone. But they are the only alternative for anyone who wants to associate as women or university students or workers in any of the social spheres that these organizations represent. By living in a neighborhood I can join the CDR or choose not to, but I won't find any other neighborhood association except the CDR. And that's how it is with everything.
The unifying and national nature of the mass organizations seeks to preserve the political system, which is based on a singly party (partido) that, as the maximum representative of Cuban society, leads everyone. The mass organizations are part of the political system, but that doesn't keep them from also being an important form of social organization.
The mass organizations were designed to represent the interests and opinions (opinión pública) of different sectors--women, peasants, workers, students and neighbors--to the state so that this representation would orient state and party policies. In representing those interests, the role of the mass organizations is to establish priorities and arbitrate differences while maintaining the necessary unity (unidad). But they have never functioned that way in practice. Initially they were large channels of representation that replaced the multiple but barely representative pre-revolutionary channels. As time passed, they became channels to transmit tasks and slogans, mechanisms for mobilization, the only spaces through which to obtain scarce resources. They were totally subordinated to the party and the state. Today the channels are weakened by routine and reality. And the mass organizations are now too few and too large to represent the plurality of Cuban society.
Mass organizations fill the social scene and are "civil society" in all models of real socialism. To those who say they don't guarantee democratic participation, one can respond that civil society organizations in the market economies and electoral democracies don't either. The challenge of having people participate in their own affairs, not only voting every four or five years, but actually proposing, debating, implementing and evaluating daily, has not yet been resolved by either socialism or capitalism.
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P
=> Participación (Participation)Participation is the criterion by which all civil society should be judged. It's not about how many associations there are, if they were created from below or from above, if the laws are narrow or broad, if they manage x amount of resources. It's about whether or not the people participate in the management of their affairs.
Cuban society in 1959 "made" the revolution by participating in this feat of social justice and national independence in a thousand ways, and largely through the recently formed mass organizations (organizaciones de masas). In the 1960s Cuban society was a fully active "civil society." No Latin American society was so active, had so many responsibilities, and at the same time participated so much and so enthusiastically. In the first years everyone mobilized to defend the borders, to get military training, to teach literacy and to vaccinate, to work in factories, mines and enterprises paralyzed by the abandonment of technicians and professionals, to guard neighborhoods, to work. Women, until then outside the labor force, entered it at massive levels. They also studied new careers, as did Afro-Caribbeans, until then without opportunities. People planted trees, faced the invaders at the Bay of Pigs, alleviated the effects of natural disasters, organized popular festivals, controlled the fair distribution of food, planted sugar cane, planted and harvested other crops, began to research new scientific areas, supported all types of innovations to cushion the effects of the blockade... In all this avalanche of participation, people also opined, discussed, proposed and thought.
Cubans have been conscious for more than 40 years that they "made" the revolution with their own hands, brains and hearts, with many forms of participation until then unknown on the island. Those were years when millions of people felt "fulfilled": they joined politics and experienced a sense of belonging to the nation and to national society. And they savored the certainty that they were supporting a cause greater than themselves. They transformed themselves and they transformed reality. Thus was power "socialized."
In 1970, the failure of the famous "harvest of 10 million," in which everyone participated but couldn't reach the ambitious goal of 10 million tons of harvested sugar cane, caused a deep moral, political and economic crisis. It began after the institutionalization of the revolution according to Soviet design, when real participation began to evolve into formal ceremony. The initial creativity shifted to routine. It was a slow but sure process, which advanced as society matured, a successful consequence of the tremendous social investment made by the very revolution being institutionalized. A paradox began to emerge that can only be appreciated today: that society, which is still growing, is ever more reflective, and has more and more political ability, finds itself facing ever higher walls of bureaucracy and paternalism (paternalismo) and ever fewer tools for direct, real, creative and adequate participation in the country's new realities.
Graffiti not yet read in Cuba: "I participate, you participate, he participates, she participates, we participate, you participate, they decide."
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=> Partido Comunista (Communist Party)The Cuban system is based on a single party, the Communist Party of Cuba. The PCC is at the center of the whole political system, as the unifying cement of Cuban society. If society is the dough, it is called upon to be the yeast.
The PCC was procreated in a process that began with the unification of two political-military organizations, the July 26 Movement and the Revolutionary Directorate, and an historical party, the Popular Socialist Party. In 1961 the three formed the ORI (Integrated Revolutionary Organization), which soon became the United Party of the Socialist Revolution of Cuba (PURS). In 1965 it adopted the name PCC. Today it has 770,000 militants. The PCC youth organization is the Union of Communist Youth (UJC), with some 500,000 militants between 15 and 30 years old.
The revolutionary leaders have always argued that, as long as the United States maintains its aggressive and anti-democratic opposition to the Cuban nation's autonomous decisions, only a single party can guarantee the necessary national unity. They have also said that if the United States modifies its policy, they would not discard the possibility of other parties in Cuba.
In 1997 Fidel Castro formulated a very unique concept of national unity and the single party. "Countries," he said, "are chaotic today, they are divided into many fractions, into a mountain of parties, because it has been required of them. Africa is at war, with massacres. In Africa even the tribes have become parties. And we have done the reverse; we have converted the parties into a tribe, into a single family."
Theoretically, the Cuban system permits and even promotes mechanisms for the party to distance itself from the state (estado) and become the representative of positions promoted by the mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) that represent the distinct sectors of society. But this distancing from the state in order to better represent society has never actually existed. The party-state symbiosis continues, with the party dominant. The lack of distance is even more obvious as one gets down to the local levels; there is sometimes more authoritarianism at the local level than at the highest national levels. "Who do you think is more authoritarian, Fidel Castro or the first party secretary in Baracoa?" a friend asks me, not rhetorically, but as a challenge for reflection.
He explains to me how, in the recent years of acute crisis, the party has been reducing itself to a tight leadership circle with direct links to the state; this is the group that manages and orients the changes in Cuba that are affecting the pocketbook, the mind and the soul of all society. "How they affect my life, they affect life, which is all one thing!" This inner circle, it is lamented, is out of touch with the great mass of party militants, who are expectant, capable, desirous of participation, able to work and offer opinions, but who, seeing that they can't do anything to modify or influence the situation, get frustrated. And undisciplined. Beyond this mass of militants is the mass of the population that does not belong to the party but is revolutionary, Cubans who also want to, can and should participate and are also waiting.
The V Congress of the PCC will be held October 8-10, 1997. The Convocation, made public in April, points out that "the process of strengthening of our socialist civil society has developed" in the last five years. It is the second time that the PCC has referred positively to the civil society concept; it is still a novel event. The first time was in the controversial Report of the Politburo of the PCC Central Committee (March 1996) which, despite its hardline positions, has the value of having been the first official text of a communist party in the real socialism tradition that recognizes and values the existence of civil society.
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=> Paternalismo (Paternalism)It characterized Cuban socialism for decades. The state (estado) was the protecting father of all members of society and tried to meet all their needs. After 1990, with the crisis of European socialism, the Great Father lost innumerable resources and paternalism began to break down. Both the Father-State and the Child-Society live on, however, in Cuba's political culture,
Paternalism in the power structures (a tendency to subsidize, to control information, an excess of norms, mistrust between generations, etc.) and paternalism in society (passivity, a culture of waiting for decisions to be made and solutions to come down from above, inertia, routine, etc.) are serious obstacles to the development of Cuba's revolution which, despite its paternalistic tendencies, prepared the people for creative and mature participation.
The cycle of human life closes where it began; children end up taking care of their parents, educating them. Today in Cuba the father-state appears to be resisting help from the child-society through education, free debate about points of view, proposing and deciding. In its resistance, paternalism, the giver of things and active promoter of opportunities, has been evolving over the years to a species of grandparentism, giver of advice and static promoter of norms.
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Pioneros (Pioneers)The José Martí Union of Pioneers is one of the eight mass organizations (organizaciones de masas) of the Cuban system. Over a million children attending primary school are members. Being a primary school student automatically converts all minors into pioneers.
Through various activities the Pioneers try to foment in children love for their country, interest in studies and vocational development. Some of these activities have the traditional touch of scout-type organizations: field trips, camping, environmental consciousness, etc.
The Pioneers are the most accepted and unquestioned mass organization. One finds people who criticize many aspects of the revolution but do not criticize the Pioneers; they become deeply emotional when, in a sort of "initiation" ceremony, their son or daughter receives the red kerchief as a symbol that he or she is growing and is ready to learn to read and write. The pioneer identity, its symbols, are always related to the flag, to love of country, to José Martí and to Che, giving this organization a more patriotic and less political connotation than others.
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=> Pluralismo (Pluralism)Cuban society is increasingly pluralist, diverse and diversified. It is richer and richer. The revolution invested a lot in human capital, with a massive, widespread and ongoing educational process, precisely to harvest this success: multi-opinioned thinkers, socio-diversity. Cuban people are asking more questions and the answers they've been hearing for years don't quite satisfy anymore. The state is less and less the revolution, and the party is less and less the state. What should the state do? And the party? What role does society play in all of this? In this time of economic crisis and society's maturity, the political system doesn't measure up. The revolution is facing a major contradiction today, which it created: it diversified and trained society in inverse proportion to the political system's ability to take advantage of these skills.
Political party pluralism is not in demand in Cuba, but social pluralism is. The pluralism of opinions, of forms of participation--expressed or not, as people feel necessary--is what can best give solutions to Cuba's complex reality. "Many of us believe that, if the government considers the country's defense a priority, society's pluralism should be an equal priority," reflects a party militant. "And we also believe that both goals can be achieved, because they aren't opposing."
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Politización de la sociedad (Politization of Society)The invasion of politics into all areas of society is a characteristic of the Cuban revolution. This invasion takes place in all models of real socialism and largely conditions the evolution of its civil societies, but in the judgment of Cuban analysts, Cuba is the socialist country where it was perhaps most marked. More than in Albania or China. This isn't because of excessive totalitarianism, but because peasant society predominated at the time of the revolution in those two countries. When the revolution began in Cuba, salaried workers predominated, even in rural society, and the proletarization process in rural areas was more advanced due to the concentration of capital and land. This made the process easier. It was enough to declare all agriculture a state enterprise.
"Insofar as the political system invaded all spheres, everything was politicized. And everything is still politicized. If I'm a philatelist and don't find the stamps I want, I interpret it as a political problem," a friend explained. "The political system comes all the way to the door of my house, and watch out that it doesn't even sneak inside! The problem is that there's no mediation between my house and the political system. What I have is a society that acts as part of the political system or is self-censored and therefore doesn't represent me. Everyone perceives the political system's omnipotence, since there's no private agent in Cuba. Since you know that neither your boss nor anybody else is going to change your fate, but rather the functionaries of the political system, you have to ask everything of them, and you blame them for everything. If they politicized everything, that's the consequence; now they're responsible for it all.
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Q
Qué Quieren? (What do they Want?)What do Cubans want? To go or stay? Freedom or food? Cuban society today is full of demands to satisfy objective material needs--oil, meat, soap, housing, transport. There are also heartfelt spiritual and subjective demands, after "objective" was identified for years with what is social, with the collective, and "subjective" was identified with individual. Even worse, with individualism.
There's a long tradition of quantitative diagnosis in Cuba, based on figures, on material things, on oriented solutions. Now there's a shift. Now there are interesting and quite surprising local experiences of participatory social diagnoses. Professionals from the Physical Planning Institute researched what people wanted done with the city center of Pinar del Río. The investigation included everyone: men, women, grandparents, children, high school students. All were asked to make two suggestions: one regarding their "material needs" and another regarding their "social satisfaction needs," which was another way of saying "subjective" needs. Among the latter, the most noteworthy was the request to repair the clock atop the Globe Hotel, silent since the start of the "special period." Though it was somewhat superfluous, such nostalgia for that old friend overshadowed demands for other, more necessary subjective demands. The clock was repaired.
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R
Reloj de Arena (Hourglass)Popular Cuban singer Carlos Varela, who calls himself a "woodcutter without a forest" and ironically recalls that "politics doesn't fit in the sugar fields," measures his dreams and hopes of a happier Cuban society with an hourglass: "I have an hourglass/to measure my pain/each second is the sorrow/falling into my heart/and though I have no illusions/something will have to change/although I dream songs/and others prefer to be quiet/But I know/that others dream too/so maybe one day this damn dream/can come true."
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S
Sociologia (Sociology)In Cuba, this science that studies society has a notable history. The system has always looked at it suspiciously, even as a competitor, because society is also the object of the work of both party and state. "Even so, the system has never known how to use the sociological science to make policy," it was commented to me.
In 1978 the Sociology and Political Science departments at the University of Havana, opened in 1971, were closed. Only a very small circle knew the reasons for this decision. Sociology was replaced with Scientific Communism and Political Science with the Militants' School of the PCC. Sociology was reopened at the end of the 1980s, but the Sociologists' Association has still not been authorized. Why? Because suspicions of these social scientists continue, as if there were no true revolutionaries among them. And because a distance is maintained with this science, as if there were a contradiction between scientific knowledge and revolutionary "faith."
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T
Transición (Transition)The Clinton plan of January 28, 1997, in accord with the commitments assumed by the US President when he signed the Helms-Burton Law, is a detailed program for Cuba's transition to capitalism. That plan definitively stigmatized the term "transition" in the revolution's official discourse. But revolutionary Cubans who today demand a more autonomous and more participatory society, one that flies out of its cage of paternalism (paternalismo), are talking about a transition to more advanced socialism.
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U
=> Unidad (Unity)Building on the foundation of egalitarianism and putting its chips always on equity, the Cuban revolution created one of the most united societies on the planet Earth. And feeding and educating the brains of Cubans awoke a rich diversity of thinking, opinions and dreams in all the children of that society. The revolution's current challenge is to conserve both unity and diversity, both so important. In Nature diversity is the guarantee of life; a single species can't survive alone. And so with society. Only a single thought, one opinion, one expression can make life languish. Diversity is the guarantee of a happy and stimulating life, the assurance of strength and survival.
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V
Volantes (Pamphlets)Theoretically, a group of Cubans could legally set themselves up on a corner of one of the country's tourist centers to gather signatures or distribute pamphlets demanding, for example, a moratorium on the construction of new tourist hotels until those already existing are 100% full and until the dramatic housing problem facing so many Cuban families is resolved.
Carrying out a campaign like this is not prohibited. But no one will do it. Why? Fear of some punishment. Calculations of the political consequences. Knowing that there's censorship. Prudence dictated by self-censorship. And also because, quite apart from any kind of repression, the political reading of an activity of that sort is that those who distribute pamphlets have no confidence in the revolution's leaders, and no one wants to be labeled that way. An immense majority really do trust in the revolution. To a reading oriented by paternalism, the same paternalism responds with self-censorship. Since paternalism (paternalismo) is at the core of Cuban political culture, extirpating it would totally change the concept of politics.
While society self-censors some campaigns, the media (medios de comunicación) continuously starts others that seek to promote attitudes, distribute ideas and even orient changes, all of which are laudable objectives. The efficacy of these campaigns is only relative, however, not so much because they are official or officious--centrally directed by the government or the mass organizations--but because they use uncreative or boring communications methods.
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W
William ClintonAfter the "raft crisis" (August 1994), President Clinton named Richard Nuccio as his chief adviser for Cuban affairs. Until then Nuccio had been senior assistant to Rep. Robert Torricelli, promoter in 1992 of the Law for Democracy in Cuba, known as the Torricelli Law, aimed at intensifying the blockade against Cuba just when the island was beginning to really feel the crisis caused by the end of the USSR. Torricelli gambled that the Cuban crisis was terminal and wanted to be the one to give the revolution the shot between the eyes.
Nuccio's post had never before existed in the White House. The new adviser came with a discourse Clinton liked: the blockade had to be maintained, and even intensified, but since the crisis was not terminal and Torricelli had not dealt the revolution its final blow, and since the policy of force (Track One in the Torricelli Law) was not giving the expected results, the hard line had to be combined with a more astute policy of penetration and influence, with Track Two. Nothing new: the classic stick with the well-known carrot.
Nuccio put the following double perspective at the center of Track Two: there's no civil society in Cuba and since there isn't, the United States will promote it with funds, projects, exchanges, scholarships, information, faxes, computers, NGOs, etc. The indecisive and ambiguous President William Clinton bought his adviser's idea.
In June 1995 Clinton announced that his government would begin to work along Track Two. In Miami, he reiterated to the US-Cuban community his commitment to "change" Cuba's existing economic, political and social system. And how exactly did he plan to do that? "We will strengthen Cuban civil society, which will be the backbone of the Cuban democracy," said the President.
In October 1995, Clinton publicized a series of new regulations to "support" the Cuban people: permitting humanitarian aid to be sent to the island; flexibility in US-Cuba trips for relatives and professionals, artists and academics; scholarships and seminars. He also proposed promoting human rights groups, independent media and dissident organizations in Cuba in various ways, and announced that US NGOs could promote the creation of Cuban NGOs. As he was filling the basket with carrots, Senator Jesse Helms and Congressman Dan Burton threw in a huge stick by pushing through the Law for Solidarity and Democracy in Cuba, also known as the Helms-Burton Law. Clinton openly opposed it.
In February 1996, immediately after Cuban MIGs downed two airplanes registered in the United States that had violated the island's airspace various times, the ambiguous and indecisive Clinton decided to sign the Helms-Burton Law. Although the law did not modify Torricelli's Track Two, this track moved to second place in practice. Richard Nuccio resigned his post, expressing his discomfort with what had happened, and a huge international debate about Helms-Burton began.
Sometimes supporting this law, sometimes defending it rhetorically but delaying its application, sometimes trying to moderate it, and sometimes quiety consenting, the ambiguous and indecisive William Clinton has tried since then to get the European Union, Canada and the Latin American countries to also combine the stick of economic war with the carrot of "Made in USA" civil society.
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X
XiomaraEvery day she listens to Radio Martí, which is broadcast from Miami to Cuba. She likes American music and Celia Cruz, which she never hears on Cuban radio stations. And above all, she listens to the news. That's how she learned that the United States has a "plan" for Cuba, the first step of which is building a civil society. Listening and listening, she has begun to believe that in a short time Cuba will be the same as New York, total happiness. Without knowing it, Xiomara has bought the agenda the United States is trying to sell in Cuba, the same one it sells in of its ideological supermarkets. It promises a society with equality and participation for all, but when the promise is bought, what it actually supports, in Cuba as in any other Latin American country, is a society with abysmal inequalities, in which participation is no more than a fading flame that rapidly goes up in smoke.
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Y
YayoHe listens to Radio Martí every day to learn where the shots are coming from, to find out in what new container the Americans are selling their poisonous potion... Listening and listening, he has discovered that it's selling a poison sealed with a label he doesn't know: civil society. Yayo is convinced that the revolution will be attacked from there this time. And every time it will hit harder, like a gun, hitting the agenda of the society in which he was born and educated, the only society he knows, to which he owes everything, the one he believes in. According to that agenda, you have to have everything in order to guarantee the greatest equality possible, but all of it under control. Meanwhile there can be no playing around with more participation or more self-esteem or more autonomy, or more cars because gas is scarce and very expensive... And if anything is clear it's that the Americans are only waiting for us to open our hands to grab their little toy so they can stick it to us.
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Z
ZoilaShe has never listened to Radio Martí and now wouldn't dream of it. She only watches television at night, because the two soap operas are very good, both the Brazilian and the Cuban. She hardly has time for anything since she began collaborating in a new neighborhood community project that she loves. After so long, she likes the new types of meetings: they aren't boring, she feels important, useful, loved, listened to; she's interested in everything again. Zoila is one of many thousands in the society created by the revolution, in a society whose goal was yesterday and is today equality for all. That's a goal for which it's worth living and dying. The great new part is that today, Zoila is experiencing, together with her immediate neighbors and other people from her neighborhood, how to build a society that still has that same goal, but is more advanced, where people live more equally because everyone, with their initiatives and opinions, participates more.
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a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America