CUBA, DEMOCRACRY AND THE ARMED OWL

At the center of the old, beautiful buildings of the University of Havana, there is a tank and beside the tank, an owl, holding a gun. I’ve never been impressed by the paraphernalia of war, but I have liked to look at the tank at the center of this prestigious and influential center of learning. On a recent visit it struck me that the image of the armed owl is symbolic of what we might learn from the Cuban situation about democracy and from the ongoing, courageous struggle of many Cuban people for social justice.

In this paper, I am concerned with a certain criticism of Cuba that arises from people on the left. I am not concerned with the range of irresponsible criticisms based on false beliefs and misguided intentions characteristic of many, particularly in the U.S., who maintain a certain perverse obsession with the example of this small struggling country. I am interested in the worry of some who acknowledge that Cuba has achieved remarkable successes in areas of health, education and social reform that Cuba is undemocratic. I intend, not to argue that Cuba is or is not democratic for I am not in a position to do so, but to examine the criticism and to see what it entails. I will suggest that the manner in which such criticisms are made by people on the American and Canadian lefts suggest a worrying tendency to rely uncritically and, it seems, unashamedly on liberal political philosophy for notions of selfhood, morality and understanding.

When people on the left claim that Cuba is not democratic, they generally cite a number of reasons. One, of course, is that there exists a single-party political system. Another is that there is no U.S. - style free press. ¹ But we might wonder why democracy, which means rule by the people, must necessarily involve these two features. Perhaps, the arguments are that the single-party system and the absence of an American-style free press are such that in fact the people are prevented from taking control of their own destiny, of ruling themselves. But if this were the case, it would seem that the arguments should involve some discussion of what it means for a people to rule itself and, given a defensible articulation of this notion, evidence that the kind of one-party system that exists in Cuba does not fulfill its responsibility. Indeed, it would seem to be important to discuss what it means, in fact, for there to be “a people”. Often, I have noticed, well-intentioned North American liberals come to Cuba and claim as a result of their investigations that “the people” are dissatisfied with Cuban socialism. But it is not clear why those who are not members of the Communist Party should have more of a claim to being “the people” than the large number who are. And even if we could be sure about what the majority thinks, it is not clear how, without begging some questions about real interests, this can provide evidence that Cuba is or is not democratic.

It is true that the Cuban state takes an unembarrassed overt stand on issues of what sorts of people Cuban citizens should be and how they should lives their lives. That is, it is clear that the Cuban state plays a strong role in defining moral and indeed personal values.

For example, in “Cuba, Nexos y Rupturas: Trés Décadas de Cultura en la Revolución”, art historian Raquel Mendieta Costa, argues that after the Revolution in 1959, social values had to be brought about by Cuban artists and historians. ² The enormous social changes introduced by the revolution were not just changes, but what she calls an encounter with history. According to Mendieta, “reality was transformed into a picture, a landscape of successive and dizzying images, as if the imagination of Marxist theory, incarnated in history, produced a transfiguration of what such images could make known ... in order to transform reality itself, a reality in which for the first time were realized in acts, concrete undertakings, the great American utopia”. Mendieta, a historian, points out that in the decade of the sixties, there was an incredible flourishing of the arts, including, as in cinema, the development of arts which had no precedent in Cuba. Yet, she says, it couldn’t have been otherwise: Profound economic, social and political changes radically altered the face of the Cuban situation and artistic and literary culture could do no less than demonstrate this transformative process. Artists and writers sought, through genres and languages previously little explored to translate the complex events that were occurring day by day (3-4).

The activities of artists of the sixties, she argues, constituted an essential gesture of opposition to the values that characterized the republican state: New social values such as anti-imperialism, latinamericanism, third worldism, anti-racism, struggle for the revindication of the popular masses - for instance, full employment, low rent, free health care and education, redistribution of land to the peasants - constituted real and daily values that began to create a new tradition, a new social psychology(2). These artists, to the extent that they were able to bring these values to life, to make them understandable and applicable, were transforming the conceptual resources of a people, in fact, creating a new sense of what that society was about, a new sense of national identity. As Mendieta says, artistic and literary activity after the revolution was not just transformative; it constituted the creating of a picture, a landscape of images that produced a transfiguration of what could be known and what could be done.

Many will feel uneasy about the idea of imposing a sense of national identity on a people. But not only was it true that the government encouraged artists and writers to promote certain values, to retell the history of Cuba. It has been an important part of Cuban education for thirty five years to teach young people values, to instruct students in what sort of person they should be, not just morally, but personally and politically. ³ It is openly urged that all curricula should follow an ideology, that ideology should be present in all programs. ⁴

The idea of imposing upon people a sense of who they are is a frightening notion in liberal democratic traditions for the following reason: we assume, following Mill, that it is better for people to act on their own values, whatever these are, as long as they are carefully thought out and sufficiently well-informed. Rawls, for instance, argues that we are only justified in interfering in other people’s choices if it can be argued that those people would themselves have chosen what we choose for them had they been capable and competent. ⁵ He insists that it will not do to intervene in peoples’ affairs on grounds that the people involved would in fact accept the choices in question if only they were suitably pressured psychologically and somehow converted to aims and values other than their original ones. For if we accept this, it will become justifiable to indoctrinate people in any way at all as long as it can be shown that after the process of psychological pressure and intimidation, the people involved would themselves accept the values imposed.

This is a deep-seated and popular view in North American and European philosophical traditions. The standard assumption often is that someone acts or chooses rationally when she weighs her options in light of relevant information, and does or chooses that which is most likely to advance more of her aims than other options. ⁶ This instrumental picture comes in many versions and is developed in different ways in idealizations. While it is sometimes not explicitly acknowledged, it operates in much discussion about political issues - discussions about how to define people’s interests, how to promote and preserve individuals’ autonomy and how to justify radical social criticism.

Consider, for instance, questions about paternalism, about whether or not to intervene in another person’s affairs for that person’s own good. If I come across someone about to step onto a bridge which I know to be broken, I will intervene and prevent that person from doing as he intended to do. I can justify my action, however, on the grounds that if the person did know that the bridge would not hold his weight, he himself would have decided not to step onto it. In other words, I would take my intervention to be justified on the grounds that the person himself would have done as I did if only he had been properly informed.

However, most people are reluctant to intervene in another person’s affairs, even if they strongly disagree, as long as that person’s choices are carefully thought out and fully informed. In discussions of paternalism, and in discussions about justifying wide-scale social policies, it is usually assumed that intervention is justified only to the extent that there is some reason to suppose that the person or people involved are not fully informed or rationally competent, and moreover that they would have chosen the act in question if only they possessed the right information and were unrestrained and competent. ⁷

What is typically assumed in questions about what is best for someone is that it is of fundamental importance what the person’s actual desires and interests are. Certainly, no one would say that what is best for someone just is what that person actually desires, since in many cases people are ignorant, under the wrong kinds of influences and so on. But we usually think that what is best for someone is ultimately defined in terms of the person’s actual psychology. Even in sophisticated idealizations of what it means to talk about an individual’s good, there is a presumption of a definite starting place, and this starting place is primarily defined in terms of the individual’s initial psychology - basic desires, interests, aims, and so on. In the case of entire societies, we might think that what is best is defined in terms of what most members would want if they were supplied with the appropriate resources, including information about inequalities, real prospects for various sorts of reform resolutions, and were in the right position to make use of those resources. Once we have a conception of what is best for an individual or a group, rational action is defined in terms of this conception: an action or a choice is rational if it is the one which is most likely to realize the person’s ends or projects when these are suitably specified.

The assumption is that respecting people’s autonomy involves respecting people’s freedom to act on their settled values and aims, without interference other than the providing of appropriate resources. The role of the state, then, is to provide appropriate resources. A just state provides the appropriate resources; it does not attempt to intervene at the level of morality, to take any active role in saying that some ways of being and living are better than others, at least not beyond the concerns of justice.

But consider Toni Morrison’s enlightening discussion of American literature in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. ⁸ National literatures, she reminds us, “seem to end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind” (14). They help to construct, as Anthony Appiah puts it, the unifying story in terms of which people acquire cultural identities and on the basis of which they interpret the world. ⁹ One might think, for instance, that blacks just don’t appear in American literature, that American literature is not about them, that they “signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American writers” (15). But Morrison says that when she approached American literature from her position and inclinations as a writer, fully self-conscious of her own struggles with and reactions to racial ideology, she saw things differently:

In American literature, Morrison demonstrates, powerful images of impenetrable whiteness “appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent or under complete control... a dark, abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing... from which our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself” (33).

For example, what was the sense of freedom and individuality that was so central to, as Morrison puts it, “that well-fondled phrase ‘the American Dream’”? In a long passage from an investigation of European settlers in the process of becoming Americans, William Dunbar, a well-educated, upper-class Scotsman, describes his experience of “a sense of authority and autonomy that he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others” (M,42). Dunbar’s plantation, we are told, was mild, by the standards of the times: “But 4,000 miles from the sources of culture, alone on the far periphery of British civilization where physical survival was a daily struggle, where ruthless exploitation was a way of life, and where disorder violence and human degradation were commonplace, he had triumphed by successful adaptation”(emphasis added) (42). The authority and autonomy that Dunbar had not known before, that central theme and presumption of American literature, is defined in terms of the boundedness, subordination, the denial of African-Americans; “It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the quintessential American identity” (44).

Morrison describes how writers like Poe, Hemingway, Twain were responsive and constrained by the “evolving story” of the “American Dream”. In Huckleberry Finn, the slave Jim is humiliated and tormented by the two children, Huck and Tom. Moreover, Huck and Tom humiliate Jim after we, the readers, have come to know Jim as a moral agent, as a caring father and a sensitive man:

What Mark Twain, Huck and Tom need from Jim is his unfreedom. What is overlooked in discussions of this novel, Morrison argues, is that “there is no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim” (56) It would have been impossible in imaginative terms for Jim to go free, because Huck’s freedom and authority presume the subordination of this black man.

The point is not that Poe, Hemingway or Twain are racist, even if they were. Nor, of course, is it that this is bad literature. If this were so, the issue at hand would be much less interesting. It would be easier and much less troublesome if we could treat the complicity of American literature in the fabrication of racism as the result of bad writers, or of writers of a particularly deficient moral character. But this is not obviously the case.

Perhaps one might say that the occasional discrepancy between aesthetic and moral judgment is explained in terms of the complexity of artistic achievement. Perhaps, although one might acknowledge the misogyny, say, of Faulkner’s writing, one might nonetheless appreciate its other moral achievements. Perhaps, the occasional promotions of misogyny are outweighed by moral/artistic achievements involving other values.

Morrison’s point, though, is that understanding of morality itself is at stake in the white American dream. Her point is not that occasional examples of racist thinking coexist with the development, through literature, of such values as the autonomy, freedom and respect for individuality. Rather, her point is that the major themes and presumptions of American literature are “made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism” (44). The making of a new American man, in American literature, she argues, is the making of a new white American man, and that very identity, that cultural identity which is presupposed in moral thinking, presumes and depends upon the subordination and dehumanization of African-Americans. Again, it would be much easier to say that these great writers just made some mistakes, that in some particular aspects of their artistic practice they appealed to the wrong moral vision. But in fact artistic achievement consists in part in the fact that the images involved move us, that they are beautiful. Morrison’s point about literary imagination is that it is precisely because stories need to be able to move, to appeal to the literary imagination, that artists had to appeal to a certain developing moral vision, one which, as it turns out, there are good reasons to think morally questionable.

When we consider the extent to which social norms and values prescribe and limit people’s choices, when we consider the extent to which such norms and values constitute, as Frantz Fanon says, “a definitive structuring of the self and the world,” ¹⁰ the difference between the North American and the Cuban systems is that in the Cuban context the imposition of value and meanings is acknowledged and discussed. Mendieta appears to be taking for granted a certain notion of human freedom which has its roots in some Marxist-Leninist traditions, just as the moral claims of the American Dream might be seen as taking for granted a specifically liberal conception. In Mendieta’s piece, she offers no defense for the positive attitude she takes toward the explicit commitment of sixties’ artists toward Jose Marti’s and Marx’ idea of the making of a “new man” but neither do many North American arguments about democracy offer defense for the the view of freedom presupposed in the American Dream. In liberal democratic traditions any explicit morally justified atttempt by the state to restrict individual options would be understood as a threat to autonomy and individual liberty, whatever the justification happened to be. What is important for the purposes of this paper is that notions of autonomy and liberty presupposed by the American Dream do in fact legitimize the imposition upon people of a universalized view that restricts the options of large numbers of people, but such assumptions about autonomy also make it difficult to identify and challenge such a moral vision.

Autonomy, Morrison argues, is understood within the American Dream as freedom from interference. Important political theorists confirm this notion, with qualifications. Will Kymlicka’s defense of minority rights in Liberalism, Community and Culture involves a lengthy argument attempting to show that concern for group rights does not involve overriding individuals’ essential interests in, as he puts it, living their lives from the inside, with true beliefs. ¹¹ In other words, individual liberty is protected if the state does not interfere with individuals’ settled aims and values. Morrison’s discussion, however, indicates that to live one’s life from the inside, on the basis of one’s settled aims and values is, at least for some people, precisely to accept the imposition of someone’s else’s moral values and norms. Kymlicka thinks that it is uncontroversial that “no life goes better by being led from the outside according to values the person does not endorse”(12). Probably, he is right that this in uncontroversial. But why should the lives of people who have been persuaded that they are inferior, indeed, that they aren’t even people, not go better if they were guided by ideals that represented their real value as persons? And why should the lives of those who have been persuaded that they are superior not go better if they were guided by ideals that expressed a more humane social vision? Morrison’s discussion suggests that it is not at all obvious that people would themselves choose values that represented a genuinely more equal society, for it is not clear that they would be able to identify such values or be able to make them understood if they could. To the extent that a society can be defined in terms of racist norms and values, so that even questioning such norms and values is unimaginable, it is reasonable to think that at least some lives would indeed go better if led from the outside according to values the person involved might well not endorse.

Personal stories based on individual difference have been significant in North American feminist political theory because personal story-telling often constitutes the introduction into theory of practical possibilities which, according to a dominant social narrative, are difficult to imagine. But it need not be the individual herself who begins to perceive things differently and then decides to act in ways that make the telling of a more adequate alternative story possible. Sometimes political change happens first. At a meeting of the Casa de las Mujeres in municipality Cerro, Havana, sixty-four year old Theresa told us that at the time of the Cuban revolution she was a thirty year old domestic worker with two small children, who did not know how to read or write. As she recounts her story, it was not any epiphanous personal insight that began the transformative path as a result of which she became leader of her union, achieved advanced qualification in her technical field and eventually represented Cuba abroad at international conferences; it was the series of social changes that presented her with educational possibilities as well as intense social and political indoctrination aimed at convincing the public in general that women, including black women like herself, need to and can be educated. Cuba’s recognized success in such areas as anti-racism, education and health reform is at least partly due to an ongoing effort, throughout the past thirty-five years to impose certain values upon society, to bring about a specific sense of national identity.

In both the North American and the Cuban context a national- social identity is imposed upon people so that some possibilities are conceivable and doable, and others not. And in both cases, a moral vision is imposed according to which some directions of thought and action become meaningless, even unimaginable. The difference is that in the Cuban context, the imposition of moral vision is acknowledged and discussed. In the North American context, it is not acknowledged, at least not officially. It may be that the Cuban state intervenes in people’s lives in ways that prevent people from acting in their real interests, but the argument for this cannot, without naivety and hypocrisy, be that a moral and social vision is imposed upon the people by the state which limits people’s options. It is true that in Cuba there has not been the claim to gendered or racialized identity by women or blacks that has occurred in the United States. There has not, for instance, been a black power movement or discussions of women’s separatism. Instead, the women’s movement in Cuba has taken place in the context of a struggle with men to support the Revolution. ¹² But it is too easy to conclude, as it seems popular to do, that gender and race relations in Cuba have been held back by this failure to differentiate. It would seem to be important also to consider the more difficult-to-identify effects on people’s self-concepts of access to health care and education, and relative freedom from social violence and political instability. In other words, it would also seem to be important to consider he effects of the specific state intervention in Cuba for people’s possibility to possess certain human expectations in the first place, something which is very difficult to consider fairly if one assumes at the outset that state intervention beyond suitably qualified liberal limits is automatically opposed to autonomous action.

A much more obvious source of undemocratic interference in people’s lives in Cuba, that is, interference that prevents people from acting in their interests, is not the state but rather the deadening weight of family-oriented, misogynist and homophobic Latin social traditions - traditions rooted in Catholicism - which government-organized educational campaigns have tried to some limited extent to examine and combat. If discussions about democracy were to begin with less arrogant and more accommodating conceptions of democracy, it would seem to be more urgent and more interesting for discussions of democracy in Cuba to consider the limiting effects of the cultural values resulting from Spanish and American domination, including an irrational obsession on the part of a highly educated Cuba population to believe, in the face of scientific evidence, that they are not being nourished, that they are not even eating, if they are not consuming meat almost every day. Indeed, serious considerations of democracy in Cuba should consider the worrying fascination on the part of many Cuban intellectuals ¹³ with a notion of Cuban identity that seems to have as its objective the solidifying and uncritical celebration of conservative cultural values which could easily be intellectually and morally limiting.

The particularly troubling aspect of superficial criticisms of democracy in Cuba is that they reveal on the part of much of the North American left a willingness to settle for the metaphysical, epistemological and moral grounds of liberal political philosophy. That is, they reveal a willing to settle for views of the self, knowledge and morality that are typical of liberal political philosophy ¹⁴ when what is most needed at this time of narrowing theoretical alternatives is a reexamination of such fundamental assumptions. It has become somewhat popular, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist block, to point out that it is a mistake to link democracy with capitalism and to think that socialism and democracy are opposed. But it is not as common to suggest as does Max Nemni ¹⁵ that in order to see how these are linked it is necessary to examine the implicit postulates of such notions. When people say, for instance, that paternalism is bound to be anti-democratic because people need to pursue wishes they actually have and not someone else’s, they presume, first, that the wishes people’ actually have possess automatic explanatory priority and, second, that the alternative to such a view involves arbitrary imposition. Both of these assumptions are questionable when we consider more carefully moral and metaphysical conceptions of self-hood and epistemological assumptions about the nature of justification. But to do so is complicated and, occasionally, personally and philosophically disruptive.

That leftists would want to see Cuban state intervention as the crucial element in discussions of autonomy and democracy, without offering any argumentative support for the notion of individual free choice underlying such criticisms, is an arrogant expression of conceptual imperialism. The presumption is that the fact that we can choose from amongst many options, without state interference in the process of choosing, is, by itself, some kind of essential component of autonomous action. It must at least be considered, however, that Marx and Lenin might have been right when they suggested that human beings find satisfaction and self-realization, not by pursuing and satisfying their actual desires and interests, but by relentlessly striving to create the world that creates us. Lenin, for instance, thought that it was more important for democratic procedure, not that people possess rights but that they possess duties to exercise those rights. For individual freedom consists in the possibility of real and potentially honest engagement with revolutionary activity, concrete revolutionary activity, continually evaluated by other active members. The idea is that human beings find freedom and self-realization through participation in processes of transformation and growth, and in the ongoing acquiring of self nd social understanding as a result of such processes. And if this is so, what is important for democracy is the existence of conditions for growth and human development of a morally significant sort, not primarily the availability of options. In order to show that Cuba is not democratic, then, it would have to be argued that the process of change is not humanly significant and that conditions are not such that individuals can effectively participate in the process, a much more interesting and enlightening sort of argument. The point here is not whether or not such an argument could be made, but rather that the sorts of questions being raised about democracy in such discussions beg precisely those questions that ought to be raised if we are to arrive at some more appropriate understanding of what would constitute movement toward a genuinely democratic society.

Speaking to the United Nations in 1960, Fidel Castro invited the audience to suppose “that a person from outer space were to come to this assembly, someone who had read neither the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx nor UPI or AP dispatches or any other monopoly-controlled publication. If he were to ask how the world was divided up and he saw on a map that the wealth was divided among the monopolies of four or five countries, he would say, ‘The world has been badly divided up, the world has been exploited’” ¹⁶ . The suggestion is that without the aid of ideology or propaganda, or at least without the aid of certain ideologies and propaganda, someone might have good reason to think something is wrong with the way the world is divided up.

Now, of course, such a person would be reasoning without knowledge of the sorts of people who live on Earth and of their relevant differences - their histories, political systems, religions and so on. But the suggestion seems to be that someone from outer space might see the sorts in a different way and might indeed find such differences irrelevant. The point, however, is not that they could be irrelevant from another perspective but that they are in fact irrelevant and that the only way this might be properly understood would be from outerspace. Castro’s point is not interesting primarily because it represents a different perspective, or the suggestion of one, but because it represents the difficulty of properly understanding something that is obviously true. The moral truth of the claim “The world is divided up badly” is hard to dispute; it’s truth is somewhat obvious. But its understanding is difficult.

The question of proper understanding may be more important than the question of truth, although the latter should certainly not be abandoned or trivialized. A belief is true, roughly, when it corresponds to the relevant state of affairs in the world. What makes a belief true are states of affairs in the world. But states of affairs can be used for different purposes, and understanding truth requires not just recognition of the purpose grasping such a truth serves but engagement with that purpose. Philip Kitcher points out that a true theory is something like a map. ¹⁷ True beliefs are beliefs that can reliably guide us to understanding what exists in the world. For instance, a subway map corresponds to facts about the world. But it wouldn’t do us much good if it didn’t correspond to only some facts and exclude others. If it didn’t pick out some facts to represent and not others, it would not serve as a reliable guide to those subway stations existing out there in the world, independently of our thinking about them. It also wouldn’t be able to serve as a reliable guide if we weren’t interested in finding the subway station or didn’t know what subway stations are. Our interest in subway stations doesn’t make the map a reliable one, if it is; the existence of the subways station in a certain position makes the map reliable. But there would be no reason to want such a map at all if there were no such interest. So while truths are dependent upon the world and how it is, their being able to guide us to further understanding of the world depends upon interests. It depends upon our having certain interests and knowing why they are significant. Thus, a story is true because of what it represents but there couldn’t be that particular story unless there were the commitment, the path of development, to which such a story both contributes and from which it emerges.

Understanding the truth of a statement such as “The world is divided up badly” requires not only a desire to understand how the world ought to be divided up but also, more fundamentally, a commitment to the idea that such an issue as how the world is divided up is indeed a useful one to investigate. The problem is not just that one has to see that there is an issue before one can appreciate the usefulness of the information. The more important problem is what is involved in seeing that there is an issue. Thus, it would appear that what is significant for the acquiring of understanding is not so much the discovery or identification of truth, but rather the commitment to the kinds of directions of development - particularly human development - that can make the right sorts of truths relevant. The difficulty of understanding that the world is divided up wrongly, even if one believes correctly that it is, is that such understanding requires an interest in the kind of possibilities for human existence its pursuit would make possible. Subway maps can correctly represent subway stations which are really out there in the world, but if no one wants to use subways, their correctness is uninteresting and will be difficult to justify.

To return to the armed owl, when Fidel Castro says “We have no alternative. We must continue dreaming”, he might have been speaking, not about social revolution and world justice, but the possibility of individual freedom for people whose choices are limited by systems of systemic global injustice. For the kinds of ways of being that appropriately ground consciousness of individual worth include vision of what a person can become, and for some people the kind of sociopolitical situatedness that can ground the appropriate sort of vision is not currently available. Because Leninist parties and regimes have tended historically to become highly centralized and oligarchic, it is assumed that they were defined that way in the beginning. But the notion of the vanguard party and Gramsci’s notion of the Jacobin Prince need to be considered in conjunction with both Lenin’s and Gramsci’s suggestions that it is impossible to have effective social change without the constant, daily infusion of theoretical vision. Without theoretical vision, without working constantly to revise and enlarge such a vision, the freedom of individuals is limited by unexamined and unacknowledged traditions and values.

Fidel Castro’s point about outerspace might have been that we can fail to understand what is clearly true if we fail to engage in the kind of bold imaginative self-criticism that envisions and strives to actually bring about new worlds, even if these are very limited. For according to Lenin, we acquire understanding as we engage with the world, sometimes being transformed ourselves by the world, in a dialectical process of real movement toward more humane conditions and states. Gramsci, for instance, claimed that “political science, as far as both its concrete content and its logical formulation are concerned, must be seen as a developing organism” ¹⁸ . That is, the normative constraints on theory, for Gramsci, are derived from a process of actual social growth, of expanding existence, where it is important to note that it is actual growth. For it is at least arguable that both Lenin and Gramsci believed that what we consider to be human growth may not really be human growth and that we have a responsibility to find this out. The active politician, the creative intellectual, according to Gramsci, is not one who moves “in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams” but one who “applies one’s will to the creation of a new equilibrium among the forces which really exist and are operative - basing oneself on the particular force that one believes to be progressive and strengthening it to help it to victory” ¹⁹ . In otherwords, the active theorist is one who works to change the balance, the equilibrium, and he does so relative to a vision that is being actually pursued. When Gramsic says that “what ‘ought to be’ is therefore concrete” ²⁰ , he is not denying normativity in favor of a descriptive relativistic view of morality, but rather making the claim, based on his rejection of thinking/being dualisms, that the only appropriate context for the justification of moral principles is one of ongoing actual human growth.

The recognition that “humanity should never renounce its dreams, its utopias” suggests that acquiring the relevant ways of seeing oneself as a kind of person involves struggle for the creation, the representation of a certain kind of direction for living and being, for an existence. It is a vision of human nature that suggests that a just society is after all one that makes possible the creation of new sorts of people. Tomas Borge points out that “if anything is an affront to human intelligence, it is the pretension that ideologies are on the way out”. ²¹ People interested in social justice should recognize the need for a Jacobin Prince, for a vision working and being worked upon, in ongoing ways, to liberate political theory and philosophy from the illegitimate presumption that a liberal moral and metaphysical vision has established itself as the only option. Moreover, for the large numbers of people for whom the issue is the possibility of life at all, one does not look just for a different point of view, for all the many alternative ways one can interpret events, the uninteresting, postmodernist “now it’s a rabbit, now it’s a chicken” insight. One looks for the right position and one uses that position to resist and to fight to build something else. That the struggle and the knowledge required to continue the struggle is represented by an armed owl is not surprising to those who not only know “the world is divided up badly” but who have tried to claim the kind of existence that can ground the proper understanding of such a belief.

References

Appiah, Anthony In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Arteaga Chacón, Nancy, “Los Valores Morales, lugar y papel en la sociedad socialista cubana”, paper presented to sixth annual Society of Cuba and North American Philosophers and Social Scientists, University of Havana, June, 15, 1994.

Fisk, Milton “Can the Cuban Revolution Survive without Democracy?” paper presented at the Society for Cuban and North American Philosophers and Social Scientists, U. of Havana, June, 1993.

Kymlicka, Will Liberalism, Culture and Community (New York: Oxford University Press)

Mendieta Costa, Racquel, “Cuba Nexos y Rupturas: Trés Décadas de Cultura en la Revolución”, paper presented at fifth meeting of the Society for Cuban and North American Philosophers, Havana, Cuba, June 21, 1993 (my translation).

Mendora, Lisette, “La Formación de Valores”, paper presented at the Fac. Ciencias Sociales, Istituto Superior Politécnico Jose A. Echeverría, Havana, Cuba, June 22, 1994.

Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

Railton, Peter, “Moral Realism”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 95. No. 2, April 1986


	For example, Milton Fisk, "Can the Cuban Revolution Survive without Democracy?" paper presented at the Society for Cuban and North American Philosophers and Social Scientists, U. of Havana, June, 1993.


	Raquel Mendieta Costa, "Cuba Nexos y Rupturas: Tr�1 D�cdas de Cultura en la Revoluci�n paper presented at fifth meeting of the Society for Cuban and North American Philosophers, Havana, Cuba, June 21, 1993 (my translation).


	Nancy Arteaga Chac�n "Los Valores Morales, lugar y papel en la sociedad socialista cubana", paper presented to sixth annual Society of Cuba and North American Philosophers and Social Scientists, University of Havana, June, 15, 1994.


	"La Formaci�n Valores", Lissette Mendora, paper presented at the Fac. Ciencias Sociales, Istituto Superior Polit袮ico Jose A. Echeverr쟬 Havana, Cuba, June 22, 1994.


	A Theory of Justice (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1971) pp248f.


	There are other pictures of individual rationality available. See Peter Railton, "Moral Realism", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 95. No. 2, April 1986, esp. pp. 166-171 for reasons for thinking that this instrumental conception is the most plausible, despite its problems.


	See e.g. Rolf Sartorius, ed., Paternalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1983); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971) p. 417.


	Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).


	In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).


	Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness", reprinted in D. T. Goldberg, The Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) p. 109.


	Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Culture and Community (New York: Oxford University Press) 12.


	See, for example, Luisa Campuzano, "Ser cubanas y no morir en el intento" Temas: Cultura, Ideologia, Sociedad (N� 5/1996) (p. 7)


	See, e.g., Cuba: Cultura e Identidad Nacional (Ciudad de la Habana: Ediciones Uni� 1995); Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, "En busca de la Cubanidad" in Debates Americanos: revista semestral de estudios hist򱨣os y socioculturales (Ciudad de la Hababa, no. 1, enero-junio, 1995) pp. 2-17.


	I have discussed these at some length in Impossible Dreams; Rationality, Integrity and Moral Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).


	Max Nemni, "Marx and Engels and the Exhaustion of `Scientific Socialism'" in Jos. Roberts and Jesse Vorst, eds. Socialism in Crisis?: Canadian Perspectives (Winnipeg: Society for Socialist Studies, Fernwood Publishing, 1992) 51-74.


	"The Case of Cuba is the Case of Every Underdeveloped Country", Address to the General Assembly, Sept. 26, 1960, reprinted in Fidel Castro, Che Guevara To Speak the Truth (New York: Pathfinder, 1992)p. 76.


	"Social Knowledge", paper presented at the American Philosophical Association meetings, NY, Dec., 1992.


	Antonio Gramsci, "The Modern Prince", Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and tr. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York; Interntional Publishers, 1971) pp. 133-4.


	Face to Face with Fidel Castro: A Conversation with Tomas Borge, Tr. Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1993)p. 179.

Journal on African Philosophy (2002)

ISSN: 1533-1067

CUBA, DEMOCRACRY AND THE ARMED OWL

References


	Ibid, p. 172.


	Ibid.