ABSTRACT
The renovative left’s attitude is reflected in the suggestion of Brazil’s Francisco Weffort that, “Socialists should marry democracy out of love, but their union with the market need be no more than a ‘marriage of convenience.’”In Mexico, while orthodox voices urge the left to drawup the blue prints for Mexican socialism immediately, liberal-left intellectuals refer vaguely to socialism while sometimes objectively supporting neoliberalism. For Cuba’s renovative left preserving the ethics of social justice and solidarity once associated with socialism and with the Cuban revolution is as important as figuring out the precise balance of state planning and market, social property and private enterprise, solidarity and individual liberty. The issues of genuine worker participation, autonomy, and control are central to the renovators’ answer to Cuba’s extreme statism. Among Cuban and Mexican leftists, many key aspects of socialist discourse have been seriously discredited, particularly those that tended to equate socialism with the rigid, authoritarian statism of the Soviet Union.
