Abstract
The interplay of religion, culture, and society in any country, at any given time, is one of the most complex phenomena experts have attempted to understand and explain. This is true in the case of democratic regimes where empirical evidence is accessible and conceptual categories are grounded in long-standing scholarly discourse, and the attempt to study these themes in a system such as Cuba’s presents considerable challenges. For example, the study of Cuba forces us to grapple with concepts that, notwithstanding broad and sometimes serious disagreements among scholars, can be employed with more or less consensus in mainstream cases. One such concept is civil society itself, which we broadly define as a complex network of individuals and groups through which people participate in community and polity. As such it includes not only civic associations and institutions, but also informal networks that are linked horizontally and, at times, vertically to political elites and the state, particularly in an effort to secure the public’s interests.
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Notes
The proliferation of literature on civil society since Robert D. Putnam’s landmark study, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), is well known. Following are a few of the works that suggest the complexity and diversity of civil society’s actors, as well as the degree to which civil society does not always support the deepening of democracy: Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
Ariel C. Armony, The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Patricia Bayer Richard and John A. Booth, “Civil Society and Democratic Transition,” in Thomas W Walker and Ariel C. Armony (eds.), Repression, Resistance, and Democratic Transition in Central America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), pp. 233–254
Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (eds.), Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999)
Mark E. Warren, Democracy and Association (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)
Michael Edwards, Civil Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
A 1957 survey of 4,000 agricultural workers in Cuba revealed that while 96.5 percent believed in God, 41.4 percent claimed no religious affiliation. In addition, although 52.1 percent claimed to be Catholic more than half of them (53.5 percent) stated they had never laid eyes on a priest and only 7.8 percent ever had any contact with one. Oscar A. Echevarría Salvat, La Agricultura Cubana, 1934–1966: Régimen social, productividad y nivel de vida del sector agrícola (Miami, FL: Ediciones Universal, 1971), pp. 14–15.
Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre: Símbolo de cubanía (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 1995), pp. 58–63.
Claude Julien, “Church and State in Cuba: Development of a Conflict,” Cross Currents, II, Spring 1961: 188; Alfred L. Padula Jr., “The Fall of the Bourgeoisie: Cuba 1959–1966,” PhD Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1974, pp. 458–459.
Ibid., pp. 37–54; Christine Ayorinde, Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004).
Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, Félix Varela: Los orígenes de la ciencia y con-ciencia cubanas (Havana: Editorial de las Ciencias Sociales, 1997)
Félix Varela, Escritos políticos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977)
Sheldon B. Liss, Roots of Revolution: Radical Thought in Cuba (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 12.
Eduardo Torres-Cuevas et al., Félix Varela: Ética y anticipación del pensamiento de la emancipación Cubana (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 1999).
Ayorinde, Afro-Cuba Religiosity, pp. 30–39; Crahan, “Cuban Diasporas”; Manuel Maza, S.J., El Clero Cubano y la independencia: Las investigaciones de Francisco González del Valle (1881–1942) (Santo Domingo: Compañía de Jesús en las Antillas, 1993)
Manuel Maza, S.J., El alma del negocio y el negocio del alma: Testimonios sobre la iglesia y la sociedad en Cuba, 1878–1894 (Santiago: Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1990).
John Kirk, Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida Press, 1989), pp. 20–22.
Crahan, “Cuban Diasporas”; Crahan, “Protestantism in Cuba,” in PCCLAS Proceedings IX (San Diego, CA: Campanile Press, 1982), pp. 59–70
Marcos A. Ramos, Protestantism and Revolution in Cuba (Miami, FL: University of Miami, 1989), pp. 20–27
Jason M. Yaremko, U.S. Protestant Missions in Cuba: From Independence to Castro (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 3–5.
The Independent Party of Color (Partido Independiente de Color [PIC]) whose leaders led the uprising used a rearing horse as their symbol, identified with the Yoruban spirit Shangó whose Catholic counterpart is Santa Barbara. Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 150–151.
In 1960 nominal Catholics constituted approximately 70–75 percent of the total population of 7,500,000, while Protestants amounted to 3–6 percent. The Jewish community numbered approximately 12,000 in the 1950s, while spiritists were estimated at about 65 percent of the total population, overlapping with other religions. In the late 1980s the Centro de Investigaciones Psicológicas y Sociológicas of the Cuban Academy of Sciences estimated that 65–85 percent of Cubans believed in the supernatural, while 13.60 percent did not. In the mid-1990s believers were estimated to constitute approximately 85 percent of the population. Currently regular practitioners are estimated by various religious sources to be around 1–3 percent. For an examination of Cuban religious statistics see Margaret E. Crahan, “Cuba,” in Paul E. Sigmund (ed.), Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America: The Challenge of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), pp. 297–298; Crahan, “Salvation through Christ or Marx”; and
Margaret E. Crahan, “The Church of the Past and the Church of the Future,” in Max Azicri and Elsie Deal (eds.), Cuban Socialism in a New Century: Adversity, Survival, and Renewal (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 123–146.
Broadly speaking, the public sphere is the public space where individuals “engage in negotiations and contestations over political and social life.” Margaret R. Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological Review, 58 (5), October 1993: 589.
See Mary P. Ryan, “Civil Society as Democratic Practice: North American Cities during the Nineteenth Century,” in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), Patterns of Social Capital: Stability and Change in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 242; Warren, Democracy and Association, pp. 162–181
Iris Marion Young, “State, Civil Society, and Social Justice,” in Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (eds.), Democracy’s Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 157.
On recent Cuban economic developments, including the evolution of the informal sector, see Philip Peters, “Cuba’s Small Businesses: Taking a Wild Ride,” in Beyond, Transition: The Newsletter about Reforming Economies (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2001); “Cuba’s International Strategy Pays Off,” Cuba Policy Report, February 4, 2005: 1–4; and Theodore A. Henken, “Condemned to Informality: Cuba’s Experiments with Self-Employment During the Special Period,” PhD dissertation, Tulane University, 2002.
Peter Roman, “The Lawmaking Process in Cuba: Debating the Bill on Agricultural Cooperatives,” Socialism and Democracy, 19 (2), July 2005: 37–56.
Some of these can be found in Pedro Monreal (ed.), Development Prospects in Cuba: An Agenda in the Making (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2002).
Maurizio Giuliano, El caso CEA: Intelectuales e inquisidores en Cuba ¿Perestroika en la isla? (Miami, FL: Ediciones Universal, 1998).
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© 2007 Bert Hoffmann and Laurence Whitehead
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Crahan, M.E., Armony, A.C. (2007). Rethinking Civil Society and Religion in Cuba. In: Hoffmann, B., Whitehead, L. (eds) Debating Cuban Exceptionalism. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12353-4_8
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