ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the analytical terrain of the state and decentralization in the 1990s. Foreign domination conditioned the formal structures and dynamics of the colonial and republican states, and the international context of the revolution continued to inform Cuban choices after 1959. The official Cuban perspective on democracy remains an important part of the circumstances of reform, while the formal and nonformal participation of ordinary people—women, men, youth, and others—provides an indispensable viewpoint on bureaucracy, power, and the responses of the socialist state. The investigation of the state, bureaucracy, and the schools in Cuba began with claims that the prospects of democratic participation are problematized by the complex realities of centralization in the modern state. Decision making is not organized into neat levels of vertical and horizontal relations, however; nor is control found in tidy institutional arrangements that deliver all they promise or promise all that is needed for democratic participation.
