ABSTRACT
Orthodox left conceptions about democracy, such as “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “democratic centralism” persist in Cuba and Mexico, but they have been seriously discredited by the collapse of European socialism and the setbacks of various Third World revolutions. In Cuba, the abruptness and severity of the regime’s post-Soviet Union crisis is helping to shatter old dogmas and create intellectual and political openings for new, though still tentative, thinking about democracy in a socialist society. Among Cuban revolutionaries, a renovative perspective on democracy emphasizes that the key issue is participation in decision-making at all levels of society, and that such participation has been very limited since the early 1960s. The renovative Mexican left’s emerging view of state-society relations is informed both by the extensive critique of authoritarian statism of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the old Communist regimes and by neoliberalism’s devastation of the welfare state.
