Challenging the Blockade of Cuba
October 09, 2013
Arnold August's "Cuba and Its Neighbors"
Challenging the Blockade of Cuba
by W.T. WHITNEY Jr.
The publication of Arnold August’s book “Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion” is an event. The author establishes that democracy is alive in Cuba. He views Cuban democracy as a process moving ahead, but with course corrections. Democracy, he suggests, is really democratization. The process has relied upon political participation by all citizens, progress toward unity and consensus, and exclusion of those bent on accumulation.
August took on a big job. Not only does he detail workings of Cuba’s national parliament and municipal assemblies and explain how elections work – a signal contribution – but he also traces the origins and evolution of democratic stirrings from colonial and slavery times to the present. He summarizes varying approaches to building socialist democracies in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, plus points out limitations of U.S. – style democracy. With its rush of themes playing out both simultaneously and over many years, August’s narrative is slow-moving at times, yet remains coherent, factual, and non-polemic in tone. He made effective use of interviews with Cuban activists and analysts.
Discussions in the United States about democracy in Cuba often stumble on the absence of elections following the victory of the revolution in 1959. August explains that revolutionary leaders concurred with most Cubans then that corrupt multi-party elections of the past had no place in the new Cuba. Democratization materialized as the Federation of Cuban Women, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and the 1961 literacy campaign. A new Constitution in 1976 instituted elections for municipal assemblies, provincial assemblies, and the National Assembly.
Soviet Bloc parliamentary and electioneering precedents were rejected. Constitutional reforms in 1992 barred the Communist Party from designating members of nomination commissions and provided for popular election of deputies to the National Assembly.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/09/challenging-the-blockade-of-cuba/