The Cuban Revolution Today: Proposals of Changes, Scenarios, and Alternatives 51
tional and juridical regulations. This will raise the profile of civil soci-
ety and of its organic expressions with regard to a state that is more
regulatory and less total and monopolist. The new model must involve
the development and improvement of the consensus decision making
established in the 1960s and modified through the years (Valdés,
2009).
The new political system being created as a result of the political
reform that began in 1992 and in accordance with the statements
made by Raúl Castro in several speeches since 2007 will have, among
others, the following features:- Freedom from the built-in features of the Soviet experience and reinforcement of
the role of popular power directed by a vanguard party, with a state that is based
on the autonomy of powers and is not ideologically defined as exclusive and in
which decentralization supplants the bureaucratization of decision making and its
merely administrative character. - The Cuban Communist Party, if it remains the sole party, as an authentic party of
the Cuban nation without dogmatic exclusions. This will involve full democratic
functioning in its internal life, significant delegation of the making and implemen-
tation of decisions to its popular bases, substantial pluralism in its ranks, and con-
finement to the strictly political domain, without administrative attributes. - Significant participation of the representative organs of Popular Power in the
political decision-making process at all levels. This will mean longer and more fre-
quent meetings of the National Assembly and its commissions, the reduction of
formal mechanisms, and an increased presence and influence of the various sectors
of the country in the organs of the Popular Power, including the National Assem-
bly. A more participatory Popular Power, with increasingly horizontal and inclu-
sive practices, will play a key role in a project of socialist self-government. - Allowing delegates to Popular Power to have their own local priorities and budgets
rather than being subordinated to the priorities of the central state institutions. - Requiring delegates to the National Assembly to live most of the time in the
municipalities that they represent in order to become deeply acquainted with the
problems of their constituencies. - Democratic election of the directors of all state centers of production and services
by the workers, and in the universities democratic election of rectors, deans, and
department heads according to previous established parameters concerning their
curricula. The directors of schools will be elected democratically as well.^33 - Although the unity of power will be maintained, decentralization of this power
and orientation of it toward the construction of local power. State institutions will