Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Advisory Democracy

  Popular Power

  Community polyclinics were not the only institutions to embody a kind of advisory democracy that Cuba championed in the 1970s. The ten-million-ton sugar fiasco convinced the leaders that a fundamental reorganization was needed, which they promised would transfer power from the center to localities. The transfer involved three major political changes: the enlargement of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) so that its membership reflected the whole population, the creation of a new constitution framed by a Cuban conception of socialist justice, and the establishment of a system of governance that—at least on paper—decentralized political power and brought individual Cubans into the decision-making process through elections.

  A high-level commission of the PCC began work on the new constitution in 1974. A draft was debated nationwide, in meetings of mass organizations and in work centers. The debates resulted in some minor modifications, but their real purpose was to give Cubans a sense of ownership over the document.19 The PCC then held its first congress in 1975, ten years after the party was formally created. It had grown from about 50,000 members in the late 1960s to 202,000, and there were many new faces at the congress, people in their twenties and thirties who essentially had grown up under the revolutionary government. The PCC Congress placed its imprimatur on the new constitution, which was approved by a national vote in February 1976.

  The new constitution proclaimed that Cuba was a “socialist state.” First, this meant that the major means of production were owned socially. Second, it meant that Cuban law and institutions were to be guided by the goal of egalitarianism. As legal scholar Debra Evenson explains, “Since egalitarian values are at the core of Cuban socialism, the constitution also establishes both equality of rights and duties for all citizens and prohibits discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin.”20 In a bow to Soviet demands, the constitution declared that the PCC is the “leading force” that “organizes and guides the common effort toward . . . the construction of socialism.” But the Communist Party had no legislative authority. That was granted to a new National Assembly and its executive committee, the Council of State, which sat at the pinnacle of the system of governance, dubbed Poder Popular or People’s Power, that functioned from 1976 to 1992.

  Castro began in 1970 to articulate a commitment to grassroots democracy that entailed giving “the masses decision making power” over the “scores of problems . . . in the cities and countryside.” This would mean substituting “democratic methods for the administrative methods that run the risk of becoming bureaucratic methods.”21 Local affairs were better handled at the ground level, not by dictates from Havana, he said, and local councils could lead people “to take an interest in the problems of production, absenteeism, amount and quality of the product.”22 But as political scientist Carollee Bengelsdorf observes, the goals of participatory democracy and decentralization contradicted the aim of “ending the wasteful aspects of the social and political chaos of the 1960s.” To infuse programs with greater rationality, the leaders believed, would require “control from the center.”23

  Poder Popular attempted to resolve the contradiction between decentralized participation and centralized control by creating a system of indirect democracy. But a 1992 law gave citizens greater direct voice in choosing their representatives at all three levels of government.24 At the first level, called circunscripciónes, Cubans elect representatives to municipal councils. Each circunscripcione has about two thousand residents. Nominations come from neighborhood meetings organized by the CDRs, not from a PCC-determined slate, and are open to anyone, whether or not a person is a member of the PCC. Municipal council members maintain their normal full-time jobs, serving as citizen-legislators. Citizens can vote starting at the age of sixteen.

  The members of provincial assemblies and the National Assembly are also chosen by direct election, though an official Nominations Commission creates the slate of candidates. The commissions at each level are made up of representatives from mass organizations at that level. For example, the members of the provincial nominations commission for Pinar del Rio are representatives from the provincial councils of the Center of Cuban Workers (CTC), Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), Association of Small Farmers (ANAP), Federation of University Students (FEU), and the Federation of Middle School Students (FEEM).

  Until now, only members of the PCC or Communist Youth (UJC) have been chosen to serve in the National Assembly, which has 614 members and is mandated to have one deputy for every twenty thousand citizens in a district. It meets twice a year for a few days each time. When it is not in session, the Council of State—which the Assembly elects—exercises legislative power. The National Assembly also elects the country’s president, who serves as head of both the Council of State and Council of Ministers, the executive branch’s coordinating body.

  In practice, Poder Popular failed to reconcile the prerogatives of decentralized power with the need to increase efficiency in the production and distribution of goods. Local councils were granted the right to make decisions about only a few issues, and they had limited resources at their command to institute significant innovations. Moreover, the PCC essentially determined who could be elected to the National Assembly. Remarkably, local elections were actively contested for many years, and neighborhood meetings did engage the citizenry. While it seemed Cubans tended to view popular power as a useless exercise by the 1990s, the greater freedom of expression and debate for twenty years produced a new kind of interest expressed in voters leaving ballots partially blank.25

  Family Code

  While the Cuban Revolution aspired to make the nuclear family “the basic unit” of society, Debra Evenson observes, it added a twist that reflected egalitarian goals.26 These were embodied in the 1975 Family Code, a visionary law whose enactment was spearheaded by Vilma Espín and the Federation of Cuban Women. Under the Family Code, spouses had “absolute equality”—both partners were given equal property rights, and both had the same obligations to care for the home and children. One partner, for example, was permitted to initiate divorce proceedings if the other did not participate equally in cleaning the house. This orientation was a marked contrast to Cuba’s pre-revolutionary Civil Code, which decreed that a married woman was obligated to obey her husband, who was the partner solely in control of marital property.27

  Another provision eliminated discrimination that had existed in earlier laws against some children. Under the Family Code, all children were considered to have the same rights, whether they were born to married or unmarried parents or were adopted. One notable provision of the Family Code, which many countries even today have not yet adopted, recognized informal marriages as having the same rights and obligations as formal marriages established by a legal authority. The Code defined informal marriages as a “union between a man and a woman who are legally fit to establish it and which is in keeping with the standards of stability and singularity.”28 The basic tenet was a carryover from the 1940 constitution, but Cuban courts generally had applied it only with respect to inheritance.29

  The Family Code did not recognize unions between same-sex partners, and Cuban law today still does not provide for gay marriages. Moreover, changes in Cuba’s patriarchal culture cannot be attributed exclusively to the Family Code. Though women did gain greater equality in the workplace, most continued to bear the brunt of housework and child care when they arrived home. But the Code set an aspirational norm for society. As the Center for Democracy in the Americas observed in a 2013 report, the Family Code created a “foundation for policies that . . . brought Cuban girls into the classroom, tripled the number of Cuban women at work and provide[d] Cuban women with rights and opportunities that are rare in the developing world.”30

  The 1976 constitution included the rights that the Family Code had established. Laws immediately flowing from the constitution in
cluded guarantees of equal rights for women to health care and social security and job protections such as maternal leave. The government also significantly increased the availability of free children’s day care, which provided women with an essential service that enabled them to work. By 1985, the number of day care centers had doubled in comparison to 1976 and was six times greater than in the mid-1960s.31

  A Dark Decade

  Despite Cuba’s significant educational achievements in the first decade after the Revolution, there were troubling signs of problems. Dropout rates were high, many school lacked up-to-date textbooks, and teacher training seemed inadequate. In April 1971, the government held the First National Congress of Education and Culture, ostensibly as a response to the problems. Indeed, the delegates put forth more than two thousand proposals for educational reform. But Fidel signaled that the conclave was about more than failing schools. His speech took aim at “bourgeois liberals” who are “at war with us,” who show no understanding of the underdevelopment Cuba was trying to overcome as a result of the “centuries of plunder” the patrons of these “agents of cultural imperialism” brought to bear on countries like Cuba.32 The congress then declared that all trends “based on apparent ideas of freedom as a disguise . . . for works that conspire against the revolutionary ideology” are “damnable.”33 This “ushered in a period of profound dogma”—a dark decade of artistic repression known as the “gray years”—that pushed many artists and writers into exile.34

  It remains unclear why the government tightened its grip on writers and artists in 1971. But recall that the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive coincided with official criticism of the global counterculture because it supposedly encouraged hedonism and individualism. The 1971 crackdown may have emerged from this root. Possibly the leaders feared dissent, because the economic difficulties were beginning to challenge Cubans’ faith in the viability of the Revolution. Leaders sought unity as a way to prevent the further erosion of hope.

  The circumstance that sparked Fidel’s denunciations was the response by major writers around the globe—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes—to the incarceration of Héberto Padilla in March 1971.35 Padilla was an internationally respected avant-garde poet whom the government had sent abroad when it shut down Lunes. After he returned in 1967, his writing became increasingly hostile to the Revolution. In his 1968 prize-winning collection of poems, Outside the Game (Fuera del Fuego), he emphatically proclaimed that artists had to be nonconformists, independent of politics.

  During Padilla’s five-week detention in the basement of a former Catholic boys’ school, more than twenty writers signed a letter to Le Monde that denounced the Cuban government’s action and called for his release. When Padilla was released on April 27, he did not go quietly. In a “confessional” speech, which he fashioned to seem as if he had written it under duress, Padilla thanked his Ministry of Interior jailors for being “more intelligent” than he was, and for helping him appreciate how he had sinned by publishing his self-centered poetry.

  Padilla had a well-known penchant for sarcasm and satire. But government officials missed the joke, believed he was sincere, and took him at his word, which included damning condemnations of his fiancée, Belkis Cuza Malé, and his closest friend, Pablo Armando Fernández. Almost instantaneously, they were placed on a blacklist that prevented them from publishing their writing. Pablo Armando described to us his humiliation when writers crossed the street to avoid making contact with him. He had become a pariah. Padilla and Cuza Malé left Cuba before the end of the decade. Pablo Armando stayed, and ultimately was honored as “poet laureate.”

  Notes

  1. Silvia Pedraza, Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78–79.

  2. Claes Brundenius, Revolutionary Cuba: The Challenge of Economic Growth with Equity (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), 51.

  3. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso al Encontrarse con los Integrantes de la Marcha al Segundo Frente ‘Frank Pais,’” Septiembre 26, 1966, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1966/esp/f260966e.html.

  4. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 151–53.

  5. Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Informació, Anuario Estadistíco de Cuba 2013, Edición 2014, POBLACIÓN/POPULATION, tables 3.1 and 3.10, http://www.one.cu/aec2013/esp/03_tabla_cuadro.htm.

  6. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 154.

  7. “¿Quiénes Somos?” Universidad de Holguín, http://www.uho.edu.cu/?page_id=526.

  8. Gott, Cuba, 240.

  9. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech,” July 26, 1970, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1970/esp/f260770e.html.

  10. Quirk, Fidel Castro, 644.

  11. Michael Manley, The Politics of Change: A Jamaican Testament (London: André Deutsch, 1974), 79.

  12. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two Decade Appraisal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 184.

  13. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso Pronunciado en Memoria del Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara, en la Plaza de la Revolucion,” October 18, 1967; translation by the authors, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1967/esp/f181067e.html.

  14. Gary Fields, “Economic Development and Housing Policy in Cuba,” Berkeley Planning Journal 2, no. 1 (1985): 73; Eckstein, Back to the Future, 158–59.

  15. Leiner, “Two Decades of Educational Change in Cuba,” 208–9.

  16. Leiner, “Two Decades of Educational Change in Cuba,” 205.

  17. Eckstein, Back from the Future, table 5.1, 250.

  18. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 81.

  19. Debra Evenson, Revolution in the Balance: Law and Society in Contemporary Cuba (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 21.

  20. Evenson, Revolution in the Balance, 22.

  21. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the Federation of Cuban Women,” August 23, 1970, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1970/esp/f230870e.html.

  22. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution,” September 5, 1970, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1970/esp/f280970e.html.

  23. Carollee Bengelsdorf, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba: Between Vision and Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 107.

  24. Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular de Cuba, Ley No. 72, “Ley Electoral,” La Gaceta Oficial Extraordinaria, no. 9, November 2, 1992, 52, 57–59, https://www.gacetaoficial.gob.cu/codbuscar.php.

  25. Bengelsdorf, The Problem of Democracy in Cuba, 113–18; Jorge I. Domínguez, “Re-Imagining Cuba’s National Assembly,” Cuban Counterpoints, July 27, 2015, http://cubacounterpoints.com/archives/1697.

  26. Evenson, Revolution in the Balance, 123.

  27. Evenson, Revolution in the Balance, 125.

  28. Executive Branch of Council of Ministers, “Cuban Family Code” (New York: Center for Cuban Studies, 1975), 6.

  29. Max Azicri, “The Cuban Family Code: Some Observations on Its Innovations and Continuities,” Review of Socialist Law 6 (1980): 186.

  30. Sarah Stephens, “Women’s Work: Gender Equality in Cuba and the Role of Women in Building Cuba’s Future” (Washington, DC: Center for Democracy in the Americas, 2013), 32.

  31. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 43.

  32. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en la Clausura del Primer Congreso Nacional de educacion y Cultura,” April 30, 1971, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1971/esp/f300471e.html.

  33. As quoted in Domínguez, Cuba, 393–94.

  34. Leonardo Padura Fuentes, “Living and Creating in Cuba: Risks and Challenges,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 348.

  35. Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption,
and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 353–57; Gott, Cuba, 246–48.

  Chapter 15

  Becoming a Third World Leader, 1970s

  On 5 November [1975], at a large and calm meeting, the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba reached its decision without wavering. Contrary to numerous assertions, it was a sovereign and independent act by Cuba; the Soviet Union was informed not before, but after the decision had been made. On another such 5 November, in 1843, a slave called Black Carlota, working on the Triunvirato plantation in the Matanzas region, had taken up her machete at the head of a slave rebellion in which she lost her life. It was in homage to her that the solidarity action in Angola bore her name: Operation Carlota. Operation Carlota began with the dispatch over a period of thirteen days of a 650-man battalion, strengthened by special troops. They were transported to Luanda airport itself, then still occupied by the Portuguese. . . . But there can be no doubt that the immense majority left for Angola filled with the conviction that they were performing an act of political solidarity, and with the same consciousness and bravery that marked the rout of the Bay of Pigs landing fifteen years earlier. That is why Operation Carlota was not a simple expedition by professional soldiers, but a genuine people’s war.

  —Gabriel García Márquez, “Operation Carlotta”1

  Cuban leaders viewed the world differently at the beginning of the 1970s than they had just five years earlier. Détente between the Soviet Union and the United States reduced Cold War tensions, which provided space for Cuba to pursue an opening with the United States. In the Western Hemisphere, new possibilities emerged for constructive state-to-state relations in Chile, Peru, Jamaica, and Guyana. The growth of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) enhanced the organization’s viability as an agency that could empower poorer countries. Yet these changes in the global environment coincided with Cuba’s new Soviet bloc relationship, which constrained the impulse of Cuba’s leaders to support third world insurgencies.