ABSTRACT
A historical overview shows that political and administrative conditions spawned by four hundred years of colonial rule and nearly sixty years of questionable independence in the twentieth century left their mark on Cuba's socialist state and politics. Cuba was hardly a typical colony, and according to Veiz it did not share in the bureaucratic, legalistic, and civilian centralist tradition characteristic of postcolonial Latin America. Cubans pursued the promises of a representative democracy from the beginning of the republic, though formal participation defined by expressive and associational rights proved less and less meaningful within the centralization of the republican state. The 1959 revolution was a watershed in Cuban political development. The Cuban perspective on the state and socialist democracy reflected both the emancipatory tradition of classical Marxism and the Marxist-Leninist theorizing associated with the dictatorship of the proletariat. A preliminary assessment of participation provides some equally preliminary conclusions about the politics of efficiency within the centralization of Cuba's socialist state.
