48 Chapter 2
tribute to the crystallization of the features of the economic model.
The challenge consists in developing a certain type of adjustment
without “dis-socialization,” by which I mean the cancellation or sub-
stantial reduction of social benefits in health and education and the
development of great inequalities (Espina, 2007, 2008; Domínguez,
2009).
The Weakness of Democracy Based on Consensus: Political
Reform
The experiences of Spain and Portugal, which have evolved from cap-
italist dictatorships to capitalist democracies, and the Comecon coun-
tries, whose transition was from socialism to capitalism, are of no help
to us in envisioning a process of “transition” in Cuba. Socialism in
Cuba has nothing to do either with the dictatorial forms of Franco’s
regimes or with socialist countries such as Poland or Czechoslovakia
(Hernández and Pañellas, 2007). I do not, however, mean to say that
Cuban socialism is not irreversible. Everything will depend on
whether or not it is possible to reinvent Cuban socialism. Whether the
revolution succeeds in building twenty-first-century socialism will
depend on the political will of the government and the masses.
In Cuba we can observe recurrent cycles of orthodoxy and hetero-
doxy, of debate and dogmatism. The various openings have proceeded
rapidly to closings of the universe of speech and debate: (1) from the
democratization of 1970 to the Congress of Education and Culture
and the gray five-year period (1970-1975) characterized by dogmatism
in the cultural area; (2) from the debate on free agricultural markets
and increasing the level of participation in decision making to the
Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1991, which over-
looked many of the most radical proposals of that debate; (3) from
the political and economic flexibility initiating an economic reform in
1992 to the ideological hardening and closure of the debate on Cuban
problems exemplified by the disintegration of the Centro de Estudios
sobre América in March 1996 and the Battle of the Ideas of 2000.