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This special issue on Cuba stems from Socialism and Democracy's fifteen-year history of theoretical and practical concern with the interrelated fortunes of socialism and democracy in the contempor- ary world. Because Cuba occupies such an important place among the countries that have had to cope not only with the problems of socialist development but also with specific situations arising from the demise of the Soviet Union, it seemed obvious to the journal's editors that a special publication on Cuba was long overdue.

I am not claiming that our country is a perfect model of equality and justice. We believed at the beginning that when we established the fullest equality before the law and complete intolerance for any demonstration of sexual discrimination in the case of women, or racial discrimination in the case of ethnic minorities, these phenomena would vanish from our society.

We do have a National Assembly "even though many people are unaware of it" characterized by a democratic spirit that fills us with pride because it is the neighbors who put up the candidates, nominate them for delegates of their districts, and elect them by direct and secret ballot. No candidate is nominated by the party. They are all freely nominated by the district residents "no more than eight and no less than two candidates, from whom one is chosen" and elected on the basis of their own merits and capacity.

One of the twenty-first century’s main challenges for some Latin American countries will be solving the agrarian problem. Cuba is facing this challenge by implementing an unprecedented reform. In 1993, almost all state agriculture was transformed into self-managed cooperatives. A three-year study of the resulting changes was recently completed with the fruitful collaboration of Hannover University, in Germany, and two scientific centers at the University of Havana.1

The municipal, provincial and national assemblies of People’s Power constituted in 1976 replaced the provisional institutions of government that had operated during the first years of socialist construction in Cuba.  These Organs of People’s Power (Órganos del Poder Popular or OPP) were designed to provide real, regular, and more systemic and systematic forms through which people could participate in running the society.