Political Principles of the Cuban Socialism Doctrine: Towards the History of Emergence and Development

Abstract

Socialism as a political trend and a system of certain ideological positions has been experiencing a kind of renaissance in recent years. Cuban socialism is a special phenomenon of recent history, which has continuously existed and developed for six decades in the most difficult conditions of the North American foreign economic blockade and in the presence of other threats of a socio-political nature. Solving numerous issues of practical and transformative activity, the Cuban socialist doctrine generalized and formulated many new theoretical propositions, a number of which will be able to significantly influence the formation of an updated socialist doctrine claiming the ideological and semantic possibility of a world alternative.The paper analyzes the basic principles characterizing the doctrine of Cuban socialism in matters of ethics, relations with the church, the foundations of education, assessing the prospects of the institution of statehood in the 21st century, and evaluating other political projects that had points of joint intersection with Cuban socialist theory and practice.Cuban socialism is a specific phenomenon that arose as a result of a number of objective and subjective factors. By the end of the 1950s the century-and-a-half struggle of Cubans against colonial and then neocolonial exploitation were intensified by the Soviet vector and its influence in the international arena as the second great power with the aggravation of the Cold War. These factors together with the “island life” on a par with the Catholic, peasant community of the majority of the population, the sacrifice and service of several generations of the young Cuban elite, the combination of the cult of courage and guerrilla traditions with the special cruelty and repressiveness of the Spanish colonial apparatus of the 21st century, and then relying on American support of the Cuban dictatorships of the first half of the 20th century is a set of factors that gave rise to the “spring effect” in the social consciousness of the island society. In addition to objectively determined reasons, a huge role in the long-term maturation of the conditions for the emergence of the Cuban socialist project was played by the traditional personality for the Ibero-American culture. All of the above would have been impossible outside of the long-term activities of a whole galaxy of brilliant Cuban political leaders.