Renowned Cuban academic Calls for “Participatory Democracy” in Cuba
HAVANA TIMES — Cuban academic Camila Piñeira, daughter of the late guerilla commander Manuel “Red Beard” Pineiro, on Wednesday called for “participatory democracy” on the island, while basing this on the economic reforms of President Raul Castro, reports AFP.
“If the changes are concentrated only on ‘improving the economy’, not only will we fail to achieve the objective of improving the material conditions of the Cuban population, but the social cohesion that has sustained the revolution will be affected,” said Pineira, who is also the daughter of the Chilean leftist theoretical Marta Harnecker.
“The desirability of democracy — not liberal ‘representative’ democracy, but ‘real’ or ‘participatory’ democracy — is widely accepted in today’s world,” emphasized the young researcher in an article published in the online edition of the Cuban journal Temas (in Spanish).
Pineira is known internationally for her research aimed at promoting cooperatives in Cuba.
Political democracy tends to emanate from economic democracy. If this is correct, then the “participatory democracy” called for by Camila Piñeira should include a call to make Cuba a socialist cooperative republic.
Only such a republic, in which private property rights are restored and appreciated for their revolutionary potential, can make the economy both democratic and dynamic.
What is needed for democracy in Cuba is an economic system under socialist state power in which most productive property is owned primarily by cooperative workers and individual proprietors, with the socialist state holding significant partial, silent co-ownership of most–not all–industry and commerce.