Untitled - Convivencia

SOMETHING NEW FOR CUBA:CIVIL SOCIETY’S PRIMACYEditorial 20. Mar-Apr-2011. Convivencia Magazine. www.convivenciacuba.esCuba experienced during the 20 th centurythree ways of organization as a nation:colonialism in which the primacy of anothernation deprives the colony of its sovereignty;capitalism in which market outweighs theState and the civil society; and this model ofsocialism in which the State imposes itself ina totalitarian way over market and over civilsociety. The injustices that these three sociopoliticaland economic ways cause are wellknown.Almost anybody would like to come back tothe past to copy it identically in our future.Neither one model nor the other such as wehave experienced them is right. This is so,among other reasons, because such modelsdon’t exist in almost in any place of thisworld anymore.Cuba is searching, following different paths,one way to structure its society. It’s anurgent need. Almost everybody believes thatthe state of things must change. But thequestion is: the change, where to?We believe that every healthy and lastingchange should combine: novelty,experiences and roots.The experiences lived cannot be invented ormodified, they are the recent past. They arethere. The anthropological roots cannot betorn out from the present or forgotten in theremote past. The national pantheon of theidentity is also there and it should be asource and a path for the new things. Thethings we should recreate, reinvent, conceiveand agree are the things that are novel forthe future. Then, what would be truly novel inthe Cuba of the 21 st century?A long way of reflection has led us to identify aconstituent element of the social body whichhas not been the main protagonist of the nationyet: the civil society.We don’t say that a flourishing and boomingcivil society did not exist in the last centuryuntil the year 1959 when it started to bethoroughly dismantled. On the contrary webelieve that the dense fabric of socialinteractions and the enterprising andindependent character of the civil societyduring the first five decades of the 20 th centurybuilt a republic with lights and shadows. Buteven with its injustices and inequalities, thatrepublic carried in its heart a plural, inclusiveand democratic seed, in spite of everything.The novelty and the concept of civil societyWe believe that “the novel thing” would be toachieve the rebuilding of the civil society withthe free and plural participation of all Cubansfrom the Island and from the Diaspora, first ofall, by reaching an agreement on theidentification and acknowledgement of whatthe term “novel”, which is relativelycontemporary, means to Cuba. Manyunderstand it this way:-It’s the open, complex, diverse, inclusive andinteractive collection of relations and resourcesthat constitute a social fabric or a civicframework of all those natural groups; social,cultural, sports, political, professional, welfare,supportive associations; of all those religious,Ediciones ConvivenciaPinar del Río. 201281