CLC-Conference-Proceeding-2018

Community Development and Social Equity in Cuba:
Achievements and Perspectives i
Maria del Carmen Zabala Arguelles
The purpose of this work is to present
the experiences and perspectives of Cuba
regarding community development and the
promotion of social equity at the
local/community level. First, we present the
trends that have characterized community
development in Cuba throughout the last few
decades; then we touch on those related to
theoretical and methodological references that
support these practices, and we end with some
experiences related to community
development: Comprehensive Neighborhood
Transformation Workshops, the Havana
Historian's Office and experiences by the
Cuban Program of the Latin American Faculty
of Social Sciences ii .
Brief Notes on Community Development in
Cuba
Communities have had an important
role, both as a support system and a leader in
executing several different programs,
campaigns, mobilizations, and social tasks in
Cuba since the Revolution triumphed in 1959.
Starting with the economic crisis triggered in
the nineties, the importance of this scenario has
been rescaled, as a result of the limitations to
main resources when solving problems and of
the increase in population and activities that
take place in that area; two important events
took place that are consistent with this reality:
the creation of Popular Councils (1992), local
government bodies that coordinate and
integrate community actions and organizations,
and the establishment of the Departmental
Group for Cuban Community Work (1996),
whose aim was to strengthen collaboration
between community organizations and entities.
From then until now, community
development in Cuba has been characterized by
its revitalization, diversity and wealth of
experiences according to its purposes and
methods, the plurality of players and social
structures involved in them, and the
coexistence of tendencies that reveal different
levels of social participation, all within a
scenario of increasing social complexity.
But the crisis and economic reform that took
place in the nineties also had damaging effects
on Cuban society, among them the decay of
quality of life of the population, the increase of
several different social problems, processes of
socioeconomic restratification and the
reemergence of social inequality, which are all
clearly reflected in the communities.
At the start of this century, a broad
array of social programs were launched with
strategic aims at social development--in the
fields of health, food, education, culture,
employment and social security, and their goal
was to deal directly and personally with
problems that had gotten worse throughout the
most serious years of the economic crisis. In
this sense, new players emerged onto the
community scene: emerging teachers, art
instructors, social workers, municipal
university campuses, among others, which
articulated to a lessor or greater extent the
experiences with community development that
existed previously.
The most recent moment, which is
referred to as the “process of updating the
Cuban economic model,” has focused its
interest also on the local-community level. In
the Guidelines for the Economic and Social
Policy of the Party and the Revolution,
sanctioned in 2011, the need to strengthen local
participatory management in the territories
stands out as a way to solve different problems
in the country, and to ratify the principle of
equity as an essential pillar of the Cuban social
model; this implies that a focus on equity must
be included in the agendas of local
development.