By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 30 2007 (IPS)

Close to one of the busiest crossroads in the Cuban capital, but peaceful nonetheless, the non-governmental Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Centre (CMLK) has been active in Cuban society for two decades, working for a more participative social system.

According to its own definition, the Centre is “a Christian-inspired organisation engaged in inter-faith dialogue, which works prophetically and in solidarity with the Cuban people and its churches, on training and education to promote informed, organised and critical popular participation to bring about social justice.”

“Out of commitment to the Cuban Revolution’s socialist project, and out of religious conviction, we take our stance looking towards the South, because the South is where the Good News is happening, the South is where the poor are,” said Reverend Raúl Suárez, head of CMLK, at last week’s celebrations of the 20th anniversary of its foundation.

Suárez, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in the Havana district of Marianao, was a prominent agent in the foundation of the Centre, which was created as a means of incorporating his Christian congregation into action for “building a fraternal society.”

He is also a parliamentary deputy, and says he is a “firm believer in the revolution.” He has been criticised by Cuban spokesmen for the Roman Catholic Church for what they described as his “complete submission to the Castro regime.”

The CMLK, named in honour of the legendary U.S. civil rights leader, runs four main programmes: participative popular communication; pastoral and socio-theological reflection and training; popular education in support of local groups; and a solidarity action programme.

To further these ends, it publishes the magazine Caminos, a forum for Cuban socio-theological thought, and a bulletin in print and digital formats with updated information on the Centre’s work. It houses Caminos, a publisher, and an audiovisual production unit of the same name, as well as the Paulo Freire information and documentation service.

The goal of the socio-theological and pastoral training programme is preparing young leaders for the Cuban churches. It encourages social commitment and responsibility from the religious perspective.

Founded Apr. 25, 1987, the CMLK originally adopted Brazilian pedagogue and philosopher Paulo Freire’s (1921-1997) ideas about popular education, developed in the 1960s. Although at first the Cuban authorities were wary of these ideas, they were actually a means of furthering the cultural transformations engendered by the Cuban Revolution.

Popular education is “profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-hegemonic, and critical of Western culture that takes it for granted that some social groups are naturally dominated by others,” the programme coordinator, María Isabel Romero, told IPS.

Romero said that these relations of domination are seen in such everyday contexts as the family, the school, or relationships between men and women, all of which to a greater or lesser extent are characterised by asymmetrical, and not infrequently authoritarian, uses of power.

“Popular education brings about a change in individuals’ visions and conceptions which is reflected in their social practices,” said Romero, who gave as examples of these transformations “learning to listen, to work in groups, to construct proposals in a collective way, to communicate as equals – in brief, to enter into dialogue.”

The CMLK regularly offers training workshops on the theory and practice of popular education, on its own premises or as distance learning courses. It also advises community work projects and similar schemes that are working to support field workers, social participation and grassroots empowerment.

By working together with the CMLK in popular education, the department of agricultural extension at the Agrarian University of Havana understood that it should incorporate participative principles in the training of agronomists and other agricultural extension workers and experts, and as a result, the curriculum and the basic tenets of agricultural extension work have been reformed.

So now the knowledge already possessed by small farmers is taken into account before technical innovations are introduced, Communications Professor Julia María Fernández told IPS.

The governmental Local Development Centre is another example of an organisation that has established close contacts between academia and grassroots sectors. In this case, popular education methods and principles are being incorporated into the activities of municipal governments, especially in Jatibonico, about 360 kilometres east of Havana.

“This has been an uphill struggle, because we live in a society which, like nearly every other society in the world, has an ingrained culture of domination,” said engineer Humberto Pomares, an expert with the Local Development Centre.

“Although in Cuba there is plenty of revolutionary rhetoric, the methods and customs of domination are still maintained,” he said.

“There is an abundance of prejudices to deal with when people start thinking and discussing about power, because there is a belief that changing the styles of leadership, or distributing power, weakens the revolutionary process,” he said.

The CMLK’s solidarity programme, which is linked to social organisations in the United States and other countries, has been hit hard by the restrictions on visiting Cuba imposed in 2004 by the George W. Bush administration. Exchange visits with groups from the U.S. have dropped sharply since then.

However, the work with church groups in the U.S. has been very useful, as “the programme was able to transmit another view of Cuban and Latin American reality,” said Ariel Dacal of the CMLK.

The CMLK participates actively in the annual World Social Forums, the Hemispheric Meetings of Struggle Against Free Trade Agreements and for the Integration of Peoples, and in campaigns against militarisation and indebtedness in poor countries.

In Dacal’s view, it would have been impossible to express solidarity in these ways if the Centre that was started 20 years ago in a small church in Havana “had not transcended its own limits and gone beyond the borders of Cuba.”

The CMLK was awarded the Alejo Carpentier medal by Cuba’s Council of State, in recognition of its work over two decades.

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