Lessons of the Special Period

Abstract

With our attention drawn to Cuba's economic reforms and with assumptions about “transition” and about the monolithic but also “personalist” system, the Special Period's political dimension has largely been neglected, despite those years' genuine debate (about the meaning of “the revolution”) and the leadership's recognition of the need for adaptation and reappraisal. That dimension should be set against the revolution's preceding pattern—not the conventional one of “periods” but rather one of cycles—of crisis, soul-searching debate, and resulting confidence, the latter expressed through either mobilization (necessary for the “soul”) or structure (necessary for the “body”). In the 1990s this debate operated at all levels, formally and informally, until increased confidence and the Elián González campaign generated the “rediscovery” of the power of (and need for) the hitherto dangerously neglected mechanisms of mobilization and also the potential of youth as “solution” and not “problem.”