Democracy in Cuba and at Home
Weekend Edition January 9-11, 2015
A Review of Arnold August's "Cuba and Its Neighbors" (Part One)
Democracy in Cuba and at Home
by MAXIMILIAN C. FORTE
Arnold August’s Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion is a richly documented and thus very detailed description and analysis of the history, theory, and practice of democracy in Cuba. Based on several years of participant observation in Cuba, in addition to numerous research trips since 1991, Cuba and its Neighbours provides a close-up view of the Cuban process of democratization, primarily focusing on the past decade. This work builds on his first book on Cuba, Democracy in Cuba and the 1997-98 Elections (Havana: Editorial José Martí, 1999), which was based on participant observation during the elections spanning 1997-1998 and focused on the electoral process. In the 2013 book under review here, August focuses on the forms of direct democracy and popular power that exist in Cuba today, the role of mass organizations, the National Assembly, the Communist Party, and the history of Cuban constitutions, set in a wider regional comparative framework that also includes discussion of democracy in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and the US. It is a “must read” especially if you have been trained to accept the orthodox dogma that Cuba is merely a “dictatorship,” a “tyranny” that is exclusively dominated by “the Castro brothers”. August’s book does great justice to the complexity and historical development of Cuban democracy, and no discussion on that subject should proceed if one has not first read this book.
August’s interests in this area go back at least four decades, to when he was a political science student in Montreal in the late 1960s. He was part of a movement to “open the curriculum,” to include “new approaches to the South that did not encompass only theories and analyses based on the racist assumption of innate superiority that dominated academia in the North at the time” (and still today). (August, 2013, p. xiii). His aim in this book is to broaden our understanding of democracy, our understanding of Cuba, and of democracy in Cuba. He does so by bringing to light what is too often ignored, the development of a “grass-roots and revolutionary political culture” (August, 2013, p. xv). His ethnographic work involved living in Cuba for a period that spanned years, participant observation in elections, attendance in municipal assemblies and at the National Assembly, participating in meetings of the Workers’ Central Union of Cuba (CTC), and dozens of interviews with National Assembly delegates, professors, journalists, and trade unionists, among others.
What follows immediately below is a summary and overview of the text as a whole. In part 2 of this review essay, August’s book is placed within a much broader discussion on plural and diverse understandings of democracy, on democracy and political anthropology, and comes back home to discuss the nature of our democracy, at the elite level and in the everyday.
Chapter 1, “Democracy and U.S.-Centrism,” brings to the fore the question of different types of democracy, and he warns against Eurocentric misconceptions surrounding the concept of democracy (August, 2013, p. 2). His argument is that “democracy” cannot be discussed without taking into account the social and economic system in which it takes place (p. 3). Interested in alternatives, he begins by considering socialist systems compared to capitalist ones. With reference to socialist systems, he argues that though they meet a political definition of democracy by constructing collective ownership of resources, either directly or via the state, that does not automatically translate into a real and effective distribution of power. For that to occur, what is needed is participatory democracy, “the people’s ongoing daily involvement in the political and economic affairs of the country” (p. 4). He also prefers to speak of “democratization” rather than “democracy”: democratization “stresses democracy as a progression, constantly in motion. ‘Democracy’ as an abstraction tends to be fixed in time, restrained by predetermined structures and often without any socio-economic content” (p. 5). In challenging Eurocentric conceptions of democracy and politics, enshrined in the modern disciplines created in the West in the late nineteenth-century, August instead directs our attention to the political understanding of Cubanía, of Cubans thinking for themselves–“Cubanía means…putting things Cuban on the agenda” (p. 9). He also shows throughout his book that the Cuban revolutionary system possesses its own originality–it is not some copy of an imported ideology or system.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/09/democracy-in-cuba-and-at-home/
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