Cuba’s civil society

HAVANA — At the Summit of the Americas in Panama, the debate over the so-called “Cuban civil society” and the legitimacy of its representatives boiled over again.

Theoretically speaking, this is a complicated discussion, because the concept of civil society has been interpreted in very diverse, sometimes contradictory ways and manipulated extensively throughout history.

If we were to simplify it, we’d say that, beyond the complex philosophical approximations that try to explain it, it is a concept that tries to deal with the relationship of persons with the political power, wherein its essence lies.

At present, there are two different perspectives when dealing with that term: the one that conceives society as divided into bins, say, the political society (the State), the economic society (the market) and the civil society (individuals organized in families, religions, and many other personal interests) and the one that sees society as an organic whole, where these elements combine to establish a specific mode of social organization, according to the era and specific place where it is analyzed.

To Aristotle, it was the space in the polis where the condition of “citizen” took form, so the concepts of civil society and political society were equal. However, the first liberal thinkers (capitalists) established a distinction between them, because it was a way of acknowledging the existence of a bourgeois society organized against the absolute power of the feudal state.

Nevertheless, this interpretation changed once the bourgeois states consolidated between the 17th and 18th centuries and civil society became the space for the legitimacy of its adversaries (the workers and other exploited classes.)

Marx defends a dialectical relationship between both categories and places civil society in the sphere of the economy, to highlight the contradictions that are present in every “socio-economic formation” characterized by the class struggle, where the State was the “product” of this balance and is conceived not only as the “administrator of the social goods” (the government) but also as the depository of the political power of the dominant class.

That Marxist concept was deformed by a deterministic interpretation of the so-called “vulgar Marxism,” which simplified the complexities of the process by affirming that, because “the economic base determined the political superstructure,” it was enough to transform the regime of property to automatically change the system.

As a result, for various reasons, both the vulgar Marxists and the liberals practically ignored the concept of civil society, although Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s developed the Marxist theory of civil society from a methodical point of view and placed it within what he called the “historic bloc,” so as to highlight the role of culture, ethics and ideology in the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles that have characterized contemporary political life.

Paradoxically, the Gramscian theory about the role of civil society in the political processes was manipulated by the neoliberals in the late 20th Century, both to explain the collapse of the socialist camp in Eastern Europe — turning Gramsci into an antisocialist — and to weaken the social function of the national states and conceive individuals as “autonomous entities” whose freedom was concretized in the market.

The progressive social movements, disenchanted with vulgar Marxism, vindicated the existence of an organized civil society in the face of the dismantling of the traditional popular institutions, which brought about the neoliberal offensive, and channeled their political struggles from the standpoint of that logic, until they transformed — in many instances — the very nature of the governments of their countries, especially in Latin America.

The assimilation of the concept of “civil society” in one way or another is not therefore a naive option but defines diametrically opposed ideologies and political objectives with a practical impact on specific political activities.

The United States, attuned to the neoliberal ideological project, has tried to compare the concept of civil society to “the American way of life” and grant it “universal values” linked to “democracy” to justify its intervention in the internal affairs of other countries, either through divine inspiration or the excuse of achieving a “common good.” This is what we’re dealing with when we talk about the “legitimacy” of Cuba’s civil society.

Beginning in 1959, Cuban society was organized to defend the Revolution from United States aggression. That structuring of the popular masses was a Cuban contribution to the international revolutionary movement and an indispensable factor to explain its capacity of resistance over half a century.

If we accept that civil society explains the relationship of individuals to the political power, it becomes hard to deny that the revolutionary national militias, the army of teachers in 1961 or the organization of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution were not ways to organize Cuba’s civil society, to mention only a couple of examples.

Clearly, it was structured in symbiosis with the revolutionary State, conceived not as an autonomous power of the rest of society but as the depository of the people’s power.

I agree with Jorge Gómez Barata when he says that it makes no sense to present these organizations as “independent” from the Cuban state so as to “legitimize” them according to the Western, i.e., U.S. standards of a civil society.

The legitimacy comes from representing the majority of Cuban society in the specific conditions in which the revolutionary process developed. This doesn’t mean that this organization of Cuba’s civil society doesn’t require major transformations to overcome conceptual and bureaucratic deformations, to adjust to the new realities the country is experiencing and to the exigencies imposed by the construction of new consensus, as a result of its own transformations.

In fact, those questions are part of a national debate — widespread in Cuban society — that includes the revolutionary organizations, even the core of the very Communist Party.

It is a process that, on occasion, has encompassed the entire population through referenda that don’t exclude anyone, although the truth is that it needs more effective forms of participation, as well as better diffusion by the state media.

Nevertheless, this debate finds an ever more important space in the alternative means of information and proceeds in direct relation to the broadening of access to those technologies, a process that the government itself has placed among its priorities.

If anyone has benefited from this opening, it has been the so-called “dissident groups,” which, thanks to U.S. support, have gained an international repercussion that does not match its real influence in the country and appear before the world as the “representatives,” let us say the only representatives, of Cuban civil society.

Same as, by definition, I state that the revolutionary organizations are part of Cuba’s civil society, I cannot say that the oppositionists are not.

Still, I need to highlight two conditions that separate them. First, Cuban civil society has no expression in Miami. There, we’re talking about U.S. civil society.

Second, they are not “organizations independent from the State,” as affirmed by the propaganda of the media monopolies. They may be independent from the Cuban State but not of the U.S. State, which publicly — not to mention secretly as well — has directed and funded them for the past half a century.

The United States posits that its objective is to “empower” this — and no other — “Cuban civil society” to pit it against the State, which, beyond fancy doubletalk, means strengthening the domestic political opposition. The issue, therefore, is not conceptual “legitimacy” or “democracy” but the defense of national sovereignty.

There is no contradiction in the fact that presidents Castro and Obama can meet and negotiate matters of extreme interest in an environment of respect and equality, as befits sovereign states, while disqualifying the participation of those groups in the national dialogue in Cuba, inasmuch as they constitute exactly an example of the interference that must be avoided.