Cuba and Civil Society, or Why Cuban Intellectuals Are Talking about Gramsci

—for Ambrosio Fornet

There is an image abroad of Cuba as a country caught in a time warp, a vestige of the Cold War, a victim of bullying by its overbearing northerly neighbor, unable to bring itself to liberalize as long as the exiles in Miami continue to rant and rave, forever suffocating under an ideological conformity that embarrasses a postcommunist Left that still offers its support and solidarity.

I want to make a dent in this image. This notion of ideological conformity is a myth. The orthodox Soviet-style Marxism that came to dominance in the 1970s—because at the beginning of the Revolution, Cuban Marxism was anything but orthodox—was more or less swept away back in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the teaching of Marxism-Leninism in schools was dropped and the teaching of Russian was replaced with English instruction (leaving 1,200 school teachers in the lurch, along with 220 university lecturers). As the Catalan writer Manuel Vásquez Montalbán (1998, 83) observes in his report on Cuba at the time of the Pope's visit in 1998, ideological discourse on the island over the past decade has progressively abandoned Leninism, instead reinvoking the anti-imperialism of José Martí (which of course was never abandoned) and, more to our purpose here, returning to Antonio Gramsci, which means returning to the question of civil society. The process began around 1994, when the church produced a document calling for the construction of a civil society in Cuba and the literary journal La gaceta de Cuba published a controversial article on the subject. That Marx and Gramsci had used the concept came as a surprise to many people, who, as Montalbán (1998, 387) jokes, thought the term civil society was a U.S. invention aimed at weakening the Party and the socialist state; although one must add that this ignorance was largely due to the disappearance of the concept from orthodox Marxist debate in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, two years later the term was used for the first time in a Party document, in a report by Raúl Castro to the Central Committee, which referred to “la sociedad civil existente en Cuba” and “la sociedad civil socialista cubana” (quoted in ibid., 388); since then Cuba's leading journal of social sciences and the humanities, Temas, has twice published symposia on the subject, “Releyendo a Gramsci: Hegemonía y sociedad civil” in 1997 and “Sociedad civil en los 90: El debate cubano” in 1998.

Clearly Cuba in the 1990s has become a rather different ideological environment than it was in previous decades. In fact Cuban society has gone through four phases since the Revolution of 1959, each corresponding to roughly a decade. In shorthand, the 1960s was the decade of revolutionary euphoria and direct democracy; the 1970s, the decade of institutionalization and “Sovietization”; the 1980s, that of “rectification”; and the 1990s— following the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and officially called the “Special Period”—was the decade of “desencanto” or “desconfianza” (disenchantment or loss of faith). These labels are a bit schematic and sloganistic and meant only as rough-and-ready descriptors, but they serve to begin our analysis.

The 1960s

The first decade of the Revolution represented a complete rupture with the past that brought the masses into the political arena. Before 1959, civil society in Cuba took the distorted and restrictive form of a client state ruled by an oligarchy consisting of dependent capitalists and characterized by deep social inequality and racism, which excluded the great majority from full and effective participation despite a constitution that appeared inclusive. The transformation that followed the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista began with a phase of “direct democracy,” the term used by visiting intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Baran to describe what they found. Baran...