The Cubans seem to be watching President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela rather closely.

Hugo Chavez demonstrates how revolutionary leaders and their party can prevail over a bourgeois opposition at the polling place, nine times in six years.

Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas in 1990 were not electorally sophisticated enough to beat the bourgeois parties at the polls because the US National Endowment for Democracy (which now controls the "75" in Cuba), along with other imperialist organizations, came in and trained and financed the Nicaraguan capitalists into a major win.

I wouldn't be in the least surprised if the state in Cuba undergoes certain "modifications" that enhance its democratic form while the same modifications strengthen its proletarian content.

As for the form of the state, that is to say, HOW power is exercised, it may be democratic, autocratic, oligarchic, monarchic or some combination thereof.

As for the content of the state, that is to say, WHO exercises power, it may be slaveholders, aristocrats, capitalists, proletarians, peasants, or some combination thereof.

To return to the form of the state, I believe it's important to see that democracy does not per se imply liberty.

Take Florida, for example, when it became a state in 1845, it assumed a democratic form although its population consisted of 140,000 souls of whom 63,000 were slaves. See, Larry Eugene Rivers' book, "SLAVERY IN FLORIDA."

This means that 40% of the population of the Florida democracy were slaves up to the end of the Great Confederate Treason in 1865.

Hardly, liberty, I would say.

Notwithstanding the massive number of individuals held in bondage, Florida between 1845 and 1865 was still a democracy.

By democracy, I mean a form of state is which supreme power resides in the body of citizens entitled to vote, representatives elected by these citizens exercise state power, these representatives are accountable to those who vote and, last but not least, these representatives exercise power in accordance with the rule of law.

Now, notwithstanding those slaves in abundance, Florida, until the fall of the confederate traitors, had all of these blessed elements of democracy.

So, Florida had, a little while ago, a democratic form, and a slaveholding content.

Clearly, a state with, say, an autocratic or even oligarchic form, but with only 4% of its population in involuntary servitude, not 40% like old Florida, affords more "liberty" than the democracy in old Florida, especially, if the autocracy or the oligarchy exercises power in accordance with the rule of law.

By the way, the relation between master and slave may correspond exactly to the relation between capitalist and worker.
Anyway.

Fortunately, today in Florida, we no longer have a dictatorship of the slaveholders in a largely democratic form, but a dictatorship of the capitalists in a largely democratic form.

This is a significant improvement, politically speaking, you know.

By the way, a "dictatorship," in the strict sense intended here, is any state that has and uses a police, army, intelligence services, prisons, execution chambers, or the countless other means of coercion.

Now, finally, let's return to Cuba, the state in Cuba today appears, to me, to be a dictatorship of the proletariat in a form that is a mix of democracy, autocracy, and oligarchy where power is exercised in accordance with the rule of law.

Now, those "modifications" that I mentioned long ago will likely go to the second element of democracy -- representatives, elected by those who vote, exercise power.

To a significant degree, this already exists in Cuba.

But I expect the Cubans, influenced by Hugo Chavez' successes in Venezuela, will broaden the definition of "representatives" to include a few bourgeois renegades and then beat the hell out of them at the polls.

This theory of the state is straight out of Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, and, to some extent, Hegel.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin merely built on it, like Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and Franklin.

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You can reach Arthur Shaw at: Belial4444@aol.com