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2 Civil Society The Cuban Debate Michelle Marín-Dogan It is widely accepted in Cuba that the debate about civil society was one of the great debates of the 1990s. During this decade there was a boom in interest in civil society and an explosion in the use and study of the term within Cuban intellectual circles (Monal 1999; Acanda 1996). According to one Cuban analyst , such reflection represented the conceptual renovation of a term that was in need of critical rescue, having been “continually distorted” within socialist thought during the last quarter of the twentieth century (Alonso Tejada 1996, 119–20). By the end of the decade, the political scientist Miguel Limia David argued that interest in the theme was little short of “an intoxication,” which, he perceived, could not last much longer. In his view, people were quite simply “drunk on civil society” (Limia David 1999, 175). Speaking in 2003, another key figure in the Cuban intellectual world, Fernando Martínez Heredia, claimed that the debate on civil society had become “an adornment” and was no longer “profound.”1 Martínez suggested that there were other more important questions to be discussed in Cuba that had been pushed to one side or overshadowed by the interest in civil society.2 However, on 4 April 2003 and amid much publicity, a new book by the Cuban philosopher Jorge Luis Acanda was launched. It was entitled Civil Society and Hegemony (2002). With its arrival , Acanda deftly moved the theme of civil society back toward the center of debate in Cuba. Over a decade after it first began to intoxicate its Cuban audience, civil society was back on the agenda. The Contours of the Debate The fertile debate that evolved in Cuba around the theme of civil society can be traced within publications and through discussions held on the subject by research centers and Cuban NGOs whose findings were later disseminated publicly via journals and cultural magazines.3 Like their counterparts elsewhere, Cuban analysts concentrated on the philosophical controversies surrounding Civil Society: The Cuban Debate / 41 civil society and on issues of conceptual definition. The provenance of the idea was an important matter for many, particularly those socialist thinkers who were accustomed to regarding civil society as a liberal term. Most contributors traced the intellectual lineage of the concept from the early contributions of Hobbes and Locke—at times making reference to Rousseau en route—to Hegel and then on to Marx and Gramsci (see Valdés Hernández and Estrella Márquez 1994; Acanda 1996, 2002; Limia David 1997; Recio Silva 1997, 1999; Fung Riverón 2000). Others examined the relevance of the concept for what they called the “concrete” or “actually existing” internal situation of contemporary and, more occasionally, historical Cuba (Alonso Tejada 2000; López Vigil 1997), while still others balanced the two approaches, offering fascinating insights into both (Hernández 1994, 1999a; Azcuy Henríquez 1995; Alonso Tejada 1996; Dilla Alfonso and Oxhorn 1998). All, through their contributions to the debate, enriched the very dynamic that was both their focus and their impetus for reflection: the reactivation of a vibrant public space, populated by an ever more diverse range of actors and groups, provoked by the economic, political, and social changes of the Special Period. The debate was by no means confined to academic circles, nor was it heard solely within the ambit of the social sciences. Rather it spilled over and was taken up by other actors within Cuban civil society, most notably by the new development NGOs that had emerged during the late 1980s, the Cuban Catholic Church, and the políticos of the party (the Partido Comunista de Cuba [PCC], or the Cuban Communist Party [CCP]) and state. In addition, key cultural figures increasingly began to use and analyze the concept in public spaces. In a more general sense, the theme of civil society moved toward the center of public opinion as the 1990s progressed, a fact borne out by the sheer number and range of publications that began to run articles taking civil society as their focus, including La Gaceta de Cuba, Temas, Granma, Envío, Marx Ahora, and Revista Casa de las Américas, to name just a handful. Although academics, bureaucrats, politicians, and activists were all talking about “civil society,” they by no means shared the same opinion of the concept, nor were they all convinced of its suitability or relevance for Cuba’s experiences during the last decade of...

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