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Cuba and Civil Society, or Why Cuban Intellectuals Are Talking about Gramsci

Article · January 2001

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Cuba and Civil Society, or,
Why Cuban intellectuals are talking about Gramsci
Michael Chanan

Nepantla, Views from South, Vo.2, No.2 pp.387-406

For Ambrosio Fornet

There is an image abroad of Cuba as a country caught in a time-warp, a vestige of the Cold
War, a victim of bullying by its overbearing northerly neighbour, unable to bring itself to
liberalise as long as the exiles in Miami continue to rant and rave, forever suffocating under
an ideological conformity which embarrasses the post-communist left that still offers its
support and solidarity. [1]
I want to make a dent in this image. This notion of ideological conformity is a myth.
The orthodox soviet-style marxism which came to dominance in the 1970s - because at the
beginning of the Revolution, Cuban marxism was anything but orthodox - was more or less
swept away back in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the teaching of
Marxism-Leninism in schools was dropped, and Russian language teaching was replaced by
English (leaving 1,200 school teachers in the lurch, along with 220 university lecturers). As
the Catalan writer Manuel Vásquez Montalbán observes, in his report on Cuba at the time of
the Pope's visit in 1998, ideological discourse in Cuba over the past decade has progressively
abandoned Leninism and instead, as well as re-invoking the anti-imperialism of José Martí,
which of course was never abandoned, it has returned to Gramsci, and this means to the
question of civil society. [2] The process began around 1994, when the church produced a
document calling for the construction of a civil society in Cuba and the literary journal La
Gaceta de Cuba published a controversial article on the subject. That Marx and Gramsci had
used the concept came as a surprise to many people, who as Montalbán jokes, [3] thought the
term was an American invention aimed at weakening the Party and the socialist state;
although one must add that this ignorance was largely due to the disappearance of the
concept from orthodox Marxist debate in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, two years later the
term 'civil society' came to be used for the first time in a Party document, in a report by Raúl
Castro to the Central Committee, which referred to 'la sociedad civil existente en Cuba' and
'la sociedad civil socialista cubana', [4] and since then, Cuba's leading journal of social
sciences and the humanities, Temas, has twice published symposia on the subject, 'Releyendo
a Gramsci: hegemonia y sociedad civil', in 1997, and 'Sociedad civil en los 90: el debate
cubano', in 1999.
Clearly Cuba in the 90s has become a rather different ideological environment to that
of previous decades. In fact Cuban society has gone through four phases since the Revolution
of 1959, each corresponding to roughly a decade. In shorthand, the 60s was the decade of
revolutionary euphoria and direct democracy; the 70s of institutionalisation and
'sovietisation'; the 80s of 'rectification'; and the 90s - following the collapse of Communism in
eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and officially called the Special Period, was the decade
of 'desencanto' or 'desconfianza' - disenchantment or loss of faith. These labels are a bit
schematic and sloganistic, and meant only as rough-and-ready descriptors, but they serve to
begin our analysis.

The 60s
The first decade of the Revolution represented a complete rupture with the past which
brought the masses into the political arena. Before 1959, civil society in Cuba took the
distorted and restrictive form of a client state ruled by an oligarchy consisting of dependent
capitalists and characterised by deep social inequality and racism, which excluded the great
majority from full and effective participation despite a constitution which appeared inclusive.
The transformation which followed the overthrow of Batista began with a phase of 'direct
democracy' - the term was used to describe what they found by visiting intellectuals like
Sartre, C.Wright Mills and Paul Baran. Baran, for example, returning from a visit in 1960,
described the Cuban 'system' as 'based at present on direct democracy in action, on the
people's unlimited confidence in and affection for Fidel Castro'; adding that the time is not
too distant 'when it will become indispensable to create and develop institutions essential to
the normal functioning of a democratic, socialist society.' [5]
Now, although the victors of the Revolution, the July 26th Movement led by Castro,
soon accepted the Communist Party as partners in government, they did not at first install a
conventional constitutional regime, either liberal or socialist. As the left wing commentator
K.S.Karol wrote in his study Guerrillas in Power, published at the end of the Revolution's first
decade:
Cuba had no Soviets or consultative assemblies; her citizens were merely invited
to take a personal interest in the affairs of their resurrected nation. But Cuba was
no totalitarian state either, not even a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. All in all,
therefore, the term 'direct democracy' seemed a fair enough, though inadequate,
description of a socialo system in embryonic form still trying to establish itself.
Furthermore, a whole series of popular organisations had emerged in the wake of
the first outburst of popular enthusiasm. There was the Militia, the symbol of a
whole nation under arms; the various Committees for the Defence of the
Revolution; the ANAP (National Association of Small Farmers); the revolutionary
trades unions; and many others. No doubt Paul Baran looked upon all these as
rudimentary expressions of the popular government of the future. They were
halfway stages between that vague entity called direct democracy, which had
infused them with life, and the kind of proletarian democracy that sill had to be
created and developed. [6]
For commentators of a right wing, or even a naive liberal bent, there is no ambiguity
here: Cuba under Fidel Castro became, simply enough, a dictatorship; and the counter-
revolution duly charged his regime with the destruction of civil society, economic freedom,
human rights, etc. But there is quite another way of looking at the amorphous condition
described by Karol and others - as a state of affairs, albeit temporary, in which the distinction
between political society and civil society disappears, not because civil society is suppressed,
but because the two become momentarily fused.
 Let me try to unpick this. The concept of civil society, which at best of times is
somewhat vague, fuzzy and ambiguous, can be traced back to the philosophers of the Scottish
Enlightenment, including Francis Hutcheson and the two Adams, Ferguson and Smith, in the
18th century. Here, civil society is the domain in which the individual exercises autonomy in
a communal setting, according to the moral standards of civility and civil virtue, and in
contrast to the uncivilised state of natural society supposedly based on unmediated needs. It is
conceived as essentially a socio-economic space, which is separate from both the state, on the
one hand, and the privacy of the household on the other. However, state and civil society are
complementary, because it is the state which regulates the norms that govern autonomous
civil activity. Thus there could be no markets without the rule of law, the enforcement of
contracts, and private property guaranteed by public authority; conversely, the powers of
government could not be limited unless free markets, private property and free association
were able to circumscribe the government's scope for intervention. [7] In short, the classic
idea of civil society inherited by subsequent thinkers, bourgeois and otherwise, implies a
certain combination of socio-economic and political arrangements: a market economy
operating under a regime of private property, and a government which is limited and
accountable and operates under and maintains the rule of law; all of which is subsumed in the
German translation of the English term which was used by Hegel, in which 'civil society'
becomes 'bourgeois society'. In due course this conception expands to include the range of
voluntary associations, political, economic, social and cultural which correspond to what
Habermas has construed as the public sphere. It is this expanded notion of civil society which
bourgeois ideologues will counterpose to actually existing socialism after the Bolshevik
Revolution, as if the Soviet abandonment of the term was indeed tantamount to the
elimination of civil society under Communism (rather than some kind of transformation).
If orthodox Marxism was to identify civil society closely with the economic factor, in
other words, civil society as the social infrastructure of the capitalism, therefore superseded
under socialism, a revision of the concept in the last decades of the twentieth century suggests
a different approach, which places greater emphasis on social practices and institutions which
are related to economic activity more loosely. These practices are in many ways the products
of the very evolution of civil society, and the expression of its lifeworld; they are also
necessarily shaped and constrained by the economic and legal forms which the state enforces.
In this view, which broadly corresponds to the notion of civil society in the work of
Habermas, civil society may be seen rather as the infrastructure of the public sphere, or as
one writer puts it, the soil that nourishes it. The public sphere, says Nancy Fraser, is an arena
conceptually distinct from both the state and the economy: 'it is not an arena of market
relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theatre for debating and deliberating rather
than for buying and selling': 'a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in
principle be critical of the state'. [8] In this conception there is still a link with the economy,
and transformations of the economy produce transformations in civil society - and in the
public sphere - but civil society cannot be reduced to the economic which is only one of its
aspects, and not necessarily the determining factor (or only, if you like, as Engels put,
determining in the last instance).
But this conception also broadly corresponds to the notion of civil society in one of
the few crucial Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century who challenged the economism of
Marxist orthodoxy, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's writings were first translated into Spanish in
Argentina in 1958, and rapidly reached Cuba to influence the generation of politicians and
intellectuals who found themselves at the fulcrum of a real revolution, in which cultural
transformation - that is to say, a radical shift in consciousness, in ways of thinking about
social and political relations - appeared to be as much the motor of revolutionary change as
any transformation in economic relations, perhaps indeed - heretical idea - its condition. In
short, the resonance which Gramsci found in Cuba has much to do with his emphasis on
subjective factors in both society and the revolutionary process, and this was an emphasis that
was also found in the thinking of Che Guevara which left such an indelible mark on the
Cubans. If the Revolution, for Che, primarily stood for social justice, he also believed - and
this became the subject of an important debate in the early 60s - that material incentives were
incompatible with the social aims of the Revolution because they would weaken
revolutionary consciousness, and according to Che, revolutionary consciousness was the
greatest asset of a socialist society. Not everyone agreed with him about incentives, but the
point is that, as Karol observed, all these questions were discussed quite openly, unlike in
other socialist countries. And Castro too was impressed with the importance of subjective
elements. Karol reports a conversation with him in 1967 where he commented that
Ideally, revolutions should be made when the objective and subjective conditions
are perfectly balanced. Unfortunately, this happens too rarely; all we can say is
that when the objective conditions are ripe but the revolutionary will is lacking,
there will be no revolution. On the other hand, when the objective factors are not
quite perfect, but the subjective will is there, the revolution has every chance of
success. [9]
Indeed if anything, the first decade of the Cuban Revolution was marked by a such a strong
degree of idealism and voluntarism that it became an integral element of what became known
as the 'Cuban heresy', which centred on the advocacy of guerrilla warfare in Latin America
and elsewhere as a means of creating revolutionary conditions and which so upset both
Washington and Moscow. It was part and parcel of this ethos that the kind of Marxist
thinking which flourished in Cuba in the 60s was a long way from what Sartre called 'lazy
Marxism', the mechanistic approach which reduced everything to the effects of economic
forces, and which was largely a product of the institutionalisation of Marx's writing by official
Communist ideology; an ideology which clamped dialectical thinking into rigid categories
(and from which those who contested the orthodox interpretation did not by any means
always manage to escape themselves).
Gramsci, as contributors to the two Temas symposia point out, in fact uses the term
'civil society' in different ways. Thus, in one passage from the Prison Notebooks he holds that
the distinction between political society and civil society, which is presented by the classic
liberal theorists as an organic reality, is 'merely methodogical', because 'in actual reality civil
society and state are one and the same'. [10] This is close to Marx's own conception and his
explanation is that civil society is not 'the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic
facts' but 'a form of state "regulation", introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive
means'. Classic laissez-faire liberalism is itself a political programme, a deliberate policy,
conscious of its own ends. (The same could of course be said of the neoliberalism of the
1980s.)
 At other moments, however, Gramsci uses the term 'civil society' to designate 'the
ensemble of organisms commonly called "private"' that are not formally part of the
government, the judiciary, and the forces of law and order - or control and repression as he
calls them. [11] However, 'private' is a misleading epithet here. These organisms in fact range
from trades unions to the churches by way of schools and universities, as well as the gamut of
what are nowadays known as NGOs (or in the UK, Quangos, that is Quasi-Autonomous Non-
Government Organisations). In this conception civil society is not so different from the
public sphere: it is the realm in which power, authority and the social elite seeks to organise
consent and hegemony, but also where consent and hegemony may be contested by the
sectors they dominate. In this sense, civil society may indeed be counterposed to the political
order, which ultimately rests on the state's monopoly of violence, whereby the rules of
citizenship are enforced by means of the law and where necessary, coercion, or the threat of
it. But these are not two separate realms, so much as the same social configuration seen under
different aspects, because in actually existing social space political society and civil society
exist in mutual relation, and thus interpenetrate each other.
Both conceptions would imply that if the political regime is transformed, and a
different economic system is installed, then civil society will also change, and indeed Gramsci
himself, discussing the theory of syndicalism, speaks of the idea of 'a new kind of civil society'
(although he criticises the syndicalists in turn for their economism). But then it also turns out
that a move in the opposite direction can produce pertinent effects. Philip Oxhorn has
observed that the coerced marginalisation brought about in Latin America by right-wing
military rule had the counter-intentional effect of stimulating the growth of community-
based popular organisations which became the locus for resistance to military repression.
From Chile to El Salvador by way of Peru and Nicaragua, a myriad of organisations grew up
during the 1960s and 70s at the grass roots level, based on direct participation at the popular
level, dealing with the problems of inadequate housing, food, health care, water and
electricity supplies, and the protection of human rights. In short, a collective response to
economic, political, social and cultural exclusion, which fostered among the excluded an
alternative identity, that of vecino or 'neighbour', and an alternative more democratic
lifeworld. This, says Oxhorn, represents 'an important element in the strengthening of…civil
society'. [12] (And having been privileged to film a few of these grass-roots organisations in
Mexico, El Salvador and Nicaragua, I would here add my personal testimony in support.) [cf
R. Hernández in 1999 p166]
In Cuba, in precisely the same period, it was the revolutionary process which
stimulated the growth of popular participation. The local Committees for the Defence of the
Revolution, for example, which have been frequently characterised by hostile commentators
as a network of neighbourhood informers, can be better understood as a form of grass-roots
collective security which appeared at a time of counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs, and
which combined security with more sociable functions, such as carrying out campaigns of
vaccination and going shopping for sick neighbours. Later, they served as forums for the
discussion of the new family code, the new constitution and other measures. This does not
mean that the CDRs were not susceptible to political manipulation. On the contrary, this is a
form of popular participation that exerts huge pressures on people to conform, and can be
very nasty to those who don't (witness the events of Mariel in 1981, when many people were
hounded out by their local CDR to join the boatlift to Miami). But nonetheless they should
not be relegated to the impersonal forces of the 'system', but considered as a manifestation of
civil society and part of the daily lifeworld.
One of the things that emerges from this discussion is why the concept of civil society
is necessarily fuzzy. First, it has no centre. It is a terrain of interest groups, organisations and
constituencies which may compete or diverge or overlap. Second, its opposite ends elide with
what is above and below, and may pull in opposite directions. The prime example in liberal
democracies is the political party itself, which is linked into the structures of government and
power, while the base remains rooted in civil society. Thirdly, apart from political and
religious allegiances, which are each mutually exclusive, the individual may belong to
different social groups and constituencies at the same time, and may even experience conflicts
between them (which of course exposes them to political manipulation).
Fourth, and in Cuba's case, most profoundly, what happened in the 1960s was that
the triumph of the Revolution completely recast civil society precisely because it radicalised
the political domain in a manner that redefined the political subject and the character of
citizenship. For example, as one of the contributors to the first Temas symposium, María del
Pilar Díaz-Castañón, explains, an astonishing transformation took place in the very
institution of the family, which now became thoroughly politicised as virtually every
member of the household began to participate in society. [13] Indeed in many families the
process began with the children, as teenagers went off to join in the literacy campaign, whose
effects of course were equally astounding, since by reducing illiteracy to the minimal level of
the most advanced countries of the West, the result was to incorporate even the most
marginal sectors of the population into the political process. Values changed, language
changed, even informal popular activities like fiestas changed as New Year's Eve, for instance,
became a celebration not only of the new year but also the triumph of the Revolution (Batista
had fled on the night of 31st December 1958). But what happens when the subject is
completely recast in political terms? Did civil society disappear? Not at all, but the
transformation stores up a problem to which several of the Temas contributors refer. As daily
life becomes indissolubly linked with the presence of the state, which becomes present in
every sphere of life, the difference disappears almost without anyone noticing. And as a
result, Cuban society remains, as Haroldo Dilla puts it in the second Temas symposium, stuck
with a concept of 'the people' which is hardly differentiated internally and lacking in
reflexivity.

The 70s
The euphoria and spontaneity and direct democracy of the 60s suffered a series of blows
towards the end of the decade, including the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia; Fidel's
ambivalent reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which fell short of condemning
it as everyone expected him to; and the debacle of the attempt at a mammoth sugar harvest in
1970. With growing economic dependence on the Soviet Union and the Comecon countries,
these events tipped the balance in the sphere of ideology in favour of marxist orthodoxy and
the hegemony of Moscow. Among the results were the closure in 1971 of the journal
Pensamiento crítico and the philosophy department at the University of Havana to which it
was linked, which had become a seat of resistance to the manuals of Marxism produced for
the Cubans by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The polemic of the manuals had already
surfaced by 1966, when figures like Aurelio Alonso rejected the newly arrived textbooks as
dogmatic and unsuitable for teaching purposes, and instead employed, among other things,
selected texts of Gramsci, who was first published in Cuba that year. [14]
There is no denying that the Cuban Communist Party harboured a definite
authoritarian current. The middle 60s was the moment of the UMAP camps, 'Military Units
to Augment Production', where people regarded as social recalcitrants or misfits were put to
work, many of them homosexuals. But as Karol records, 'in contrast to what usually happens
in socialist countries,' the writers and artists union, UNEAC, 'far from applauding the wisdom
of the political leaders' sent them a bitter letter of complaint.' Fidel heeded their appeal and
the UMAPs were dissolved.' [15] The Cuban regime should therefore not be confused with
full-blown Stalinism. It is striking that many of those involved on the losing side in the
polemic of the manuals can be found twenty-five later at the centre of another internal party
conflict over ideology, again involving a confrontation between dogmatists and Gramscians,
as we shall see in a moment. The editor of Pensamiento crítico, for example, Fernando
Martínez Heredia, is today the director of the Catedra Gramsci, an independent institute
attached to a cultural centre in Havana, and whose honorary president is the former minister
of culture, Armando Hart.
Some institutions, like the film institute, ICAIC, successfully resisted authoritarianism
in the cultural domain. Apart from the academics it was the writers, who work and operate
less collectively, who suffered the most, for 1971 also saw the notorious Padilla affair, when
the arrest and detention of the poet Heberto Padilla, followed by his act of self-criticism at a
meeting of UNEAC, was repudiated by a long list of foreigners who only three years earlier
has attended or supported the Havana Cultural Congress - including Sartre and de Beauvoir,
Italo Calvino, the Goytisolo brothers, Jorge Semprún, Susan Sontag, and Mario Vargas Llosa,
who masterminded the protest - who interpreted the incident as a betrayal of the principles
Fidel had so clearly enunciated ten years earlier in his 'Words to the Intellectuals' of 1961:
'Within the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing'. In other words, they took it as a
disturbing sign that Cuba was falling under Soviet influence culturally as well as
economically. A subsequent account of the affair by the Chilean diplomat Jorge Edwards, a
friend of Padilla's, revealed how the situation entwined the personal and the political. [16]
Padilla had became a marked man with a book of poems provocatively entitled Fuera del
juego ('Out of play') which won the UNEAC international jury prize in 1968 but aroused the
ire of the armed forces' magazine Verde Olivo, among other things for its implicit criticisms
of the Soviet Union. His behaviour, says Edwards, became somewhat paranoid, and he went
on the attack. If his paranoia was not without cause, he undid himself when he criticised
another journal for favouring a mediocre novel by the respected revolutionary writer
Lisandro Otero and ignoring a far better one by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who had
notoriously parted company with his country in 1965. As Montalbán puts it, 'To back Cabrera
Infante in those years was suicidal'. [17]
According to Ambrosio Fornet, the cultural historian who introduced the term
'quinquenio gris' - 'the five grey years' - to describe the period from 1971 to 1976, the most
lamentable aspect of the Padilla affair was that it confirmed the positions of extremists on
both sides. Each believed they’d found an authentic dissident, the first using Padilla as a
pretext to justify their dogmatism, the second as an alibi for their own prejudices. Abroad, the
cold war Cubanologists and the press declared an end to the mystique of the Cuban
revolution which had attracted so many fellow travellers among the artists and intellectuals
of the First World. Inside Cuba, the National Council of Culture (Consejo Nacional de la
Cultura) thought they could hatch a ‘new’ intelligentsia by promoting a populist rhetoric
about the cultural value of the aficonado. [18]
But there were two phases in the 70s. The grey years gave way to the period of
institutionalisation. The effect was to suppress the remains of the old civil society by
channelling it into state-governed forms. This was a process sometimes called sovietisation
but with significant differences, particularly in the cultural domain, where on the one hand,
socialist realism was generally treated as a dirty word, and on the other, there was indeed a
huge expansion of popular cultural participation and activity. In 1977, for example, there
were over 46,000 professional artistic performances which recorded an attendance of almost
12 million, and close on 270,000 aficionado performances with an attendance of almost 48
million. [19] You don't need comparative figures - this is clearly extraordinary for an
underdeveloped island of 10m people. And there can be no question that a movement on this
scale represents a very significant development within civil society.
To judge the effects of the process of institutionalisation of the lifeworld of Cuban
civil society, allow me an anecdotal observation. I still have a tape recording I made at the
first Havana Film Festival in 1979, in the wee hours on the penultimate night, of a sing-song
on the veranda of the Hotel Nacional shared by Cubans and visitors from all over Latin
America plus a few Europeans, a wonderful spontaneous moment which started when
someone brought out a guitar. The following year, the festival organisers had responded to
the conviviality of the event by providing music performed by the best new bands in town.
Those who joined in this now organised conviviality, jigging to the infectious rhythms of a
group like Irakere, included all ranks, up to the level of government ministers. This of course
is the spirit which Che summed up in his famous phrase, evoking a popular Cuban dance of
the time: the Cuban Revolution is 'socialism with pachanga'. Montalbán, however, sounds a
note of warning: 'Although 'pachanga' corresponds to release and joy, Ernesto Guevara was
also referring to improvisation in its more negative sense'. [20]
On this reading, one might be tempted to interpret the progress of the Cuban
Revolution as a dialectic between improvisation and discipline, but this in itself can be seen
from different angles.
As the current Minister of Culture Abel Prieto has recently put it, 'Frivolity, anti-solemnity,
and even tomfoolery insert themselves into the new revolutionary reality and on occasions
became a new indicator, helping us to maintain our freshness and originality'. [21] Perhaps
what one should say is that even through the 70s, the grey years and institutionalisation,
Cuba society retained the most fundamental characteristic of civil society - it remained civil,
that is to say, easy-going and congenial.

The 80s
The 80s becomes the decade of 'rectification', which in some ways anticipated Soviet
perestroika. The most deadly effect of Soviet hegemony was in the economy. It not only
preserved the island's dependency on two or three main cash crops (sugar, plus tobacco and
coffee) but the socialisation of practically all economic activity, dating back to the late 60s,
ended up depriving the urban population of the products of small scale private agriculture,
whose benefits mostly remained in the countryside, while a lack of facilities like repair shops,
and periodic shortages of necessities, led to a growth of what was quickly dubbed sociolismo -
buddyism, instead of socialismo - socialism: you could get what you needed if you knew the
right person. On top of that, there were now growing inefficiencies in all sorts of enterprises
and for all sorts of reasons, ranging from missing shipments of raw materials from Eastern
Europe to bureaucratic bungling to absenteeism. Rectification was intended to attack all these
problems, and the campaign was even launched before Gorbachev came along with
perestroika. But it was not accompanied by a Cuban equivalent of glasnost. The press,
television and radio remained under the tight control of the Interior Ministry and the
Ideological Office of the Party apparatus (cinema, on the other hand, came under the
Ministry of Culture, and enjoyed a much greater measure of freedom).
It had little effect when Fidel spoke of the need for critical journalism. However, the
cultural sphere held its own. ICAIC, for example, produced a new genre of socio-critical
comedies which began to touch on themes like the housing problem, machismo, the high
divorce rate, and the generation gap. There were even one of two documentaries about
problems like bureaucratic inefficiency, and I argue elsewhere that Cuban cinema fulfilled
the function of a surrogate or vicarious public sphere. As a young professional in Havana put
it me - a family man with small children, working in town planning - 'here people go the
cinema in order to see what the film has to say about something relevant'. But probably the
most exciting work in the 80s was that of a new generation of plastic artists who embraced
the most radical and avant garde trends abroad in the world at large to take pride of place
among emergent Latin American postmodernists. The conceptual and frequently witty nature
of the work which emerged in the 80s not only drew public attention, but made articulate
social criticisms, which the Cuban art critic Gerardo Mosquera has called "impudent parodies,
or even complete disruptions". [22]
Eventually it got too much for the hard-liners, and in 1989, as the Communist
countries of Eastern Europe entered their final crisis, Cuban artists suffered the first act of
open censorship for many years when a show was closed down for hanging a group of
disrespectful portraits of Fidel, and another group show failed to open. Mosquera
subsequently wrote that this was the final straw. The visual arts had been the first, he
suggested, to open a real critical front in Cuban culture, but now even that small space was
shut off and artists were encouraged to leave, which they began to do en masse. As Jay
Murphy wrote in 1992, 'The number of Cuban artists working abroad is truly extraordinary -
a veritable role call of the 80s generation'. [23] This of course points to the most peculiar
aspect of Cuban civil society, namely its relationship to its double, the communities of exiles,
in Miami and elsewhere, whose configuration has altered considerably in the 90s - but this is
too big a question to go into here.

The 90s
The artistic exiles left behind them, whatever difficulties they faced themselves, a decade of
crisis officially termed 'The Special Period in Time of Peace', a period of economic collapse
and near national bankruptcy resulting from the loss of Soviet and East European trade and
aid, followed against all odds by a slow and lurching recovery. The ideological effect of the
collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union was like a shock wave which
registered on every level of society, from the state to street level, to produce disillusion and a
loss of Party hegemony. For myself, I first registered these effects in the Spring of 1991 (in
other words, before the final collapse of the Soviet Union) when I spent a day on location in
Havana watching Humberto Solás shooting a new film, and got deep into conversation with
the second assistant director, who knew me slightly from a previous visit. He had a strong
need to unburden himself, to express his disenchantment, summing it up in the phrase,
'Socialism? It was a beautiful dream while it lasted, but now it's all over.' And yet he never
doubted that Fidel was the best person to deal with the situation, and had nothing but
contempt for the Miami Cubans who thought his downfall was imminent. I have since heard
the same sentiments expressed by many others, even members of the Party.
What has happened, then, is highly paradoxical: a loss of hegemony by the Party in a
one-party state but without a loss of state legitimacy. The paradox is explained by a crucial
movement of separation and identification: identification of Fidel with the country and its
destiny, which at the same time separates him from the Party and the political apparatus
which he otherwise seems to control. A caveat is necessary here, since the idea that Fidel has
total control is a parody sustained by Cubanologists abroad who persistently fail to
understand the internal dynamics of the Party and the government. Nevertheless, it would
seem that as long as Fidel maintains his political style and continues to reach over and beyond
the party apparatus to enter into personal dialogue with different groups, then his personal
charisma remains a powerfully cohesive force at the same time that the party is losing
hegemony. This naturally only raises the question of what happens after him, whenever and
however he goes - which is not a question I wish to speculate about here, although there is
little reason to suppose that the regime would simply collapse. My point is rather that what
Fidel symbolises is precisely the subjective force within the Revolution which the Gramscians
emphasise, although from a different point of view.
Let me recapitulate. In the 60s, Cuba was overtaken by revolutionary euphoria, mass
enthusiasm, the spontaneous self-incorporation of the masses, the phenomenon of direct
democracy. In terms of political discourse, this produced a non-orthodox marxism, a kind of
de facto, undeclared Gramscianism, with its emphasis on subjective forces within society and
pluralism within the Revolution, licensed by Fidel's dictum of 1961: 'Within the Revolution,
everything; against it, nothing'. The 70s, however, began with the victory of manualismo, the
clear-out of the philosophy department at the University of Havana where Gramscian
thought had taken root, a closing of ranks in the Party, and the process of institutionalisation,
although at the same time, the cultural sphere expanded enormously and cultivated a form of
licensed conviviality in the daily lifeworld.
The country only began to open up again, both internally and towards the outside
world, towards the end of the 70s. However, the 80s, the decade of rectification, did little to
strengthen civil society, although the cultural sphere recovered something of the
experimental and critical spirit of the 60s but now transposed into the new world of
burgeoning postmodernism. At the same time, the fitful growth of parallel markets and
invisible economic activity might have led to the re-emergence of an informal stratum within
the society, but it was never allowed to take root. From what I learnt when I filmed the
process of rectification in 1986, I myself believe that had it been allowed to develop, some of
the pain which followed in the early 90s might have been reduced. But in the cultural sphere,
the dynamics were healthy: there was a atmosphere that allowed some highly challenging
developments, especially in the visual arts, until a clampdown in the late 1980s.
If philosophical discourse had yet to recover, there was nonetheless an intellectual
revival in the universities which was located at first in areas like literary studies. For example,
my own introduction to both Bakhtin and Lotman came from the first translations of their
work into Spanish which were published in Cuba in the middle 80s. There were even signs of
at least a desire for fresh thinking at the heart of the Party, with the creation by the Central
Committee of an autonomous institute, the CEA - Centro de Estudios de America, intended to
function as a state-sponsored but independent think-tank. And it was the CEA where the
veteran Gramscians from the 60s found a home alongside a strong team of younger
researchers who owed their intellectual formation entirely to the Revolution, and were all of
them members of the Party.
Then, rather suddenly, at the end of the decade, Cuba was plunged into a new crisis
with the loss of the overseas support network of the Comecon countries, and dramatically
symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall, a sudden dislocation which produced in many
people, certainly within the cultural public sphere, a wave of disillusion, disenchantment, and
desconfianza, or loss of faith. The effect was to bring back into focus the whole problematic of
the subjective factor within socialist society precisely because it now seemed to be missing -
and this is exactly why Cuban marxism has returned to Gramsci and the problem of civil
society.
I don't want to exaggerate. The return to Gramsci in Cuba is not a matter of national
debate but a concern primarily of the intellectuals, doubtless because it is particularly
relevant to the question of the role of the intellectual in relation to the state. Moreover, it has
not come about without ideological confrontation. By the early 90s, the CEA had begun to
turn its attention to the Special Period in Cuba itself, in other words the country's internal
problems, the dynamic of the reform process, and relations with the U.S., and began making
policy recommendations. By the middle 90s, the thinking at the CEA had become so
independent that they had begun to think the unthinkable, and they came up with proposals
that looked to the hard-liners in the Central Committee like economic reformism. Indeed a
slim volume published in 1995 under the title 'Cuba, la restructuracion de la economia, una
propuesta para el debate' clearly outlines what might be almost be called a kind of
Scandinavian-style social democracy only with stronger safeguards against the effects of the
introduction of foreign capital.
The problem was first manifest in the distortion of the economy by a large black
market and huge inflation of the peso against the illicit dollar. Both existed before but the
collapse of East European communism led to their uncontrollable expansion, and this is what
forced the so-called dollarisation of the Cuban economy, a move that succeeded at least in
stabilising the currency and reducing the excesses of the black market. The slow growth of
small-scale private economic activity which has followed might be supposed to have an effect
on civil society, but so far this is only economic, and held under tight control. It seems there
is no room here for the emergence of new interest groups representing private economic
interests, any more than there is for independent political activity. This is one reason why the
only independent voice in Cuba in the 90s, accompanying a relaxation of the official atheism
of the party, has been the church, and many commentators see this as a ploy, the equivalent
of what Herbert Marcuse, in another context, called repressive tolerance. On the other hand,
the policy towards human rights activists has not been repressive tolerance but a cat-and-
mouse game. At one moment they are allowed to function - for example, Elizardo Sánchez
suffered no recriminations after we interviewed him for Britain's Channel 4 Television late in
1986 - but at the next, they are subjected to harassment and short-term detention. Above all,
the media within Cuba ignore them, depriving them of one of the prime means of effective
intervention in the public sphere. [24]
Now the CEA, which perceived the economic problem very clearly, was the most
renowned academic institute in Cuba, with an excellent international reputation, even if the
most anti-Castroite groups in Miami believed that it was merely a dependency of their
opposite numbers, the hard-line aparatchiks of the Party. But within months of the
publication of the 1995 volume on restructuring the economy, the institute was attacked by
those very hard-liners, who accused them of being 'imperialist agents' and 'fifth columnists'.
[25] An internal commission of investigation was set up to report on how the CEA had
become, according to the accusations, an institution which proposed the urgency of changes
in a manner which amounted to a non-party 'alternative' - in other words, it didn't speak the
official language - and thus laid itself open to becoming an instrument of enemy propaganda,
a very serious charge. In the end, the members of the institute were dispersed, but none of
them was expelled from the Party or otherwise penalised, and indeed they continued to work
on the same problems although in other organisations. Not a victory for democracy or civil
rights, says Maurizio Giuliano in his account of the affair, but not a victory for Party
orthodoxy either. [26]
Nor did it turn the tide of independent thinking, because the fact is that the import of
the turn to Gramsci is too compelling. For one thing, the Gramscian approach makes it
possible to talk of the reasons for the collapse of Eastern European socialism without
abandoning Marxist discourse. Miguel Limia, for example, speaks in the 1999 Temas
symposium, of 'deformations in the relationship between state and civil society', as a result of
which the problematic became taboo, while Armando Hart, defining civil society as 'the
means which the state has to promote democracy', asserts simply that what happened in the
socialist countries was that the Party became bureaucratic and anti-democratic. [27] The
historian Jorge Luis Acanda, the author of a study called Gramsci y la Revolución cubana,
explains that social models are never stable, that socialist hegemony is not something
established once and for all, and one of the most important things Gramsci learnt from the
bourgeoisie was how it arranged civil society so as 'to constantly structure its hegemony,
which has allowed it to survive'. In actually existing socialism (' el socialismo real'), he says,
the opposite happened - hegemony was lost because the ruling echelons failed to restructure
civil society. Another contributor, Haroldo Dilla, affirms that in Cuba before 1989, the state
made itself felt in practically all the spaces of social life and the concept of 'civil society' was
not used. Now that it is again, some of its proponents identify it with popular movements,
while others follow Habermas and emphasise communication and public opinion, but the
essence, says Dilla, is that civil society cannot be understood as something alien to the state
and antagonistic, but only different, because the form in which it regulates itself and
produces values is its own. This is what earlier writers on the subject called the ruling
contradiction in the spiritual life of Cuban society, the contradiction between Official
Ideology and Social Psychology, a contradiction ignored by Soviet marxism but treated by
independent marxist thinkers like Plekhanov, Labriola and again, Gramsci.
More importantly, Gramsci plays the same role when it comes to the question of the
need for internal changes within Cuba in the face of the historical shift which threatens the
regime's survival. That is to say, Gramsci's non-economistic Marxism points to the re-
assessment of the role of, precisely, the economic. Acanda and Dilla are both quite clear about
this. According to Acanda, the return to the question of civil society is a function of the crisis
of the state, capitalist as well as socialist, but in Cuba this is manifest in an idiosyncratic way.
Events of the 90s have made it clear that if you want to continue building socialism, then it
has give much more weight to market relations. There is a moment, says Dilla, when the state
has to cede space to other competitors, and the market begins to make an entry in various
ways: with the development of tourism, the liberalisation of the dollar, the opening towards
agricultural trading, and self-employment.
(It was, of course, the appearance of the black market which was the first sign of the
problem.) Acanda's conclusion is that the rule of socialism must now therefore be
reformulated if it is not to be lost. If this means coming to terms with the market, then from a
socialist position the solution to the problem lies in finding a way not to make market
relations the central plank.
There is clearly something to be said for Acanda's claim that 'the history of the
reception of Gramsci in Cuba is the history of the reception of marxism since 1959.' [28] This
also means that marxism in Cuba is not yet a dead duck, a claim that could be dismissed as
irrelevant only by those who think that since the end of the Cold War, the outline of the
future is no longer in doubt. But Acanda, whom Montalbán calls, in English paraphrase,
'Gramsci's man in Havana', only hints at what remains from the political angle the most
critical question. The Cuban Communist Party, he says, is found within Cuban society not
simply as a political party but as a structure which creates and disseminates values, principles
and norms; therefore to strengthen civil society should not be to weaken either the Party or
the government. It is clear that on the one hand the economy has begun to recover and on
the other both these entities, the Party and the government, remain strong, and yet to sustain
the role of the Party as the lynchpin of the Cuban system is surely the biggest challenge of all.
However, were they to succeed in democratising from within, one would be able to speak
once again and afresh of the Cuban heresy.

London, 24 May 2000 - Durham, NC, 6 November 2000 ©

Notes

1 This is a revised version of a lecture originally given at Goldsmith's College, London

in June 2000.
2 Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, Y Dios entro en La Habana, El Pais/Aguilar, 1998, p.83
and passim.
3 Montalbán, p.387
4 Cited in Montalbán, p.388.
5 Quoted K.S.Karol Guerrillas in Power, Jonathan Cape, 1971, pp.451-2
6 Karol, p.454.
7 cf Victor Pérez-Díaz, 'The Possibility of Civil Society' in John A. Hall, ed., Civil
Society, Theory, History, Comparison, Polity Press, 1995 [pp.91-2] .
8 Nancy Fraser, 'Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy', in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public
Sphere, MIT Press, 1996, pp110-14.
9 Karol, p.383.
10 David Forgacs, ed., The Gramsci Reader, Lawrence and Wishart 1999, p.210.
11 Forgacs, p.306.
12 Philip Oxhorn, 'From Controlled Inclusion to Coerced Marginalization: The Struggle
for Civil Society in Latin America', in John A. Hall, ed., Civil Society, Theory,
History, Comparison, Polity Press, 1995, pp.260-2
13 María del Pilar Díaz-Castañón in Jorge Luis Acanda et.al., 'Releyendo a Gramsci:
hegemonía y sociedad civil', in Temas no.10, abril-junio 1997, p.82.
14 See Montalbán, pp.377-9.
15 Karol, op.cit., p.395.
16 Jorge Edwards, Persona non grata, Bodley Head, 1976.
17 Montalbán, p.343.
18 Ambrosio Fornet, ‘Trente and de cinéma dans la Révolution’ in Paulo Antonio
Paranagua, ed., Le Cinema Cubain, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990, p.91.]
19 See Michael Chanan, Cuban Cinema, University of Minnesota Press 2004.
20 Montalbán p.60.
21 Quoted in Edgar Romero Romero, 'Reflexiones sobre el derrumbe del socialismo
soviético y la conservación del proyecto socialista cubano',
www.filosofia.org/mon/cub/dt.016.htm
22 Quoted by David Craven, 'The Visual Arts since the Cuban Revolution', in Third Text
no.20, Autumn 1992, p.91
23 Jay Murphy, 'The Young and Restless in Havana' in Third Text no.20, Autumn 1992,
p.117.
24 I should add that our conclusion in the report for Channel 4 was that the Cuban penal
 regime is humane - indeed rather more so than in Britain - but not the judicial
system, which was inefficient; and not the maintenance of the pre-revolutionary laws
on 'peligrosidad social', 'social danger', under which people could be detained for
presenting a risk of social disruption.
25 See Maurizio Giuliano, El Caso CEA, Intelectuales e Inquisidores en Cuba,
¿Perestroika en la Isla?, Ediciones Universal, Miami, 1998, p.49.
26 Giuliano, p.20.
27 Milena Recio et.al., 'Sociedad civil en los 90: el debate cubano' in Temas no.16-17,
octubre de 1998 - junio de 1999, pp.155-175
28 Montalbán, p.375.

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