The Changing Dynamic of Cuban Civil Society

1. Setting the Stage for a Discussion of Cuban Civil Society: The Nature of Cuban “Communism” and of the Revolution’s Political Culture

1 Setting the Stage for a Discussion of Cuban Civil Society The Nature of Cuban“Communism” and of the Revolution’s Political Culture Antoni Kapcia When assessing the nature of the Cuban political system since 1959, any attempt to apply notions of civil society (and certainly of the state and civil society) should be treated with caution. This is because the term “civil society” is now highly contested (Tester 1992). Although the concept has evolved, often beyond recognition, since its genesis, its focus has always essentially been European or North American. As such, it has arisen from specific historical experiences and periods that may not always be useful for defining and understanding experiences arising from postcolonial societies and especially ones born from processes of revolutionary change. Caution especially arises, however, from the ideology that has been underpinning the concept since the 1980s. With the onset of the last phase of the Cold War and the ascendancy of Hayekian and Friedmanite orthodoxy, bolstered by the hegemony of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and eventually neoconservatism , the concept was successfully appropriated to support an increasingly “anti-state” discourse, “state and civil society” being increasingly taken to mean “civil society against the state.” This was what especially shaped much of the ideological rationalization of political change among intellectual circles in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s (and certainly, subsequently, helped explain events in an almost teleological fashion). This was particularly true for the Polish activist Adam Michnik, who turned his previous Marxism on its head by arguing that as the Polish state entered a deep crisis beginning in 1981 Polish civil society should act as though it were free and thus strengthen itself against a weakening state. Since 1989, there has been an often unhelpful tendency to apply universally a paradigm that arose from a specific set of events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, especially to societies with a seemingly totalitarian state or an avowedly Communist one such as Cuba. This domino tendency Setting the Stage for a Discussion of Cuban Civil Society / 21 has led both to expectations of inevitable state collapse, in an unstoppable process of history (curiously paralleling Marxism’s deterministic historicism), and also to sustained policies (chiefly by U.S. administrations, policymakers, and conservative think tanks) aimed at strengthening civil society in those systems and creating the desirable and inevitable state collapse. One can certainly see such a thought process at work over Cuba, where internal dissidence—and especially, since 2003, the rise of the more uncompromising Asamblea para la Promoción de una Sociedad Civil (Assembly to Promote Civil Society—has provided the link and justification for a sustained strategy to undermine the state by strengthening civil society; this is the “twin-track” policy followed by the Clinton administration beginning in 1992, “constructed as a scene of destabilization of the system” (Hernández 2003, 28). However, pace ideology and claims for exceptionalism, the application to the Cuban case of the paradigm ought to be questionable simply on the grounds of certain fundamental patterns and historical experiences. One such pattern is the fact that between independence in 1902 and the revolution in 1959, Cuba was characterized by a demonstrably “weak” state structure, arising from the effects of the Platt Amendment and the Reciprocity Treaty of 1903,2 and then by the processes of dependence and neocolonialism. Even the revolution of 1933 did not create in the “Second Republic” (1934–58) the powerful state that it intended, but, rather, a state that was in effect more interventionist and regulatory because the new economic relationship with the United States allowed it to be so.3 Hence, with Batista’s coup of 1952, by the time the Revolution succeeded, the Cuban state was already falling apart again. However , Cuban “civil society” was by no means necessarily any stronger; indeed, Cuba’s social weaknesses can justifiably be seen as a prime factor behind the republic’s collapse and the drift toward radicalization and revolution, with civil institutions such as the Catholic Church, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy being visibly undermined by their partiality or limited social base or endemic corruption. Hence, the new revolutionary vanguard’s limited base found the task of constructing both a new state and a new civil society made all the more difficult by the lack of a nationwide organization with expertise (to achieve the former) and the departure of the middle class (for the latter), at a time, moreover, when social mobility reached bewildering proportions because of dramatic changes...