Bourgeois democracy, in its essence, presents itself as the unsurpassable horizon of political organization, the epitome of government by the people. However, a structural analysis that transcends formal appearances reveals a radically different reality: far from being a neutral system, it constitutes the political superstructure meticulously designed to administer and perpetuate the domination of the capitalist mode of production. This democracy, in its very essence, contains a fundamental contradiction: it proclaims formal political equality ("one man, one vote") while structurally consecrating and reproducing the most profound economic inequality, despising minorities, which is expressed through a structural racism that denies their full citizen participation. The State, in this framework, is nothing more than what Marx identified as the "administrative committee for the common business of the bourgeois class," a machinery whose primary function is the protection of capitalist private property and the relations of production that derive from it.

The mechanism of democratic hollowing operates through multiple interconnected dimensions. Citizen participation is reduced to the ritual and sporadic act of voting, where popular sovereignty is delegated to representatives who quickly become autonomous from their bases, initiating a process of political alienation. What we could call "the fetishism of the vote" is created, a powerful illusion of equality that hides the real structures of power. In this political theater, democracy is transformed into a marketplace where brands (parties) are chosen, which, in essence, offer to manage the same socio-economic system without questioning its foundations. The ideological devices of domination, particularly the media in the hands of capitalist corporations, function as trenches of bourgeois civil society, molding consensus and containing discontent within the limits acceptable for the reproduction of the system.

The proclaimed freedoms—of expression, press, assembly—are thus formal freedoms, emptied of real content by failing to guarantee the material conditions for their effective exercise. Freedom of the press means little when the major media are owned by oligopolies; the freedom to choose becomes a farce when options are predetermined by capitalist campaign financing and media manipulation. This democracy of form without content is projected on an international scale through a sophisticated architecture of domination where even the UN lacks true democracy by perpetuating the veto control of a few powers. Multilateral organisms like the IMF and the World Bank impose structural adjustments that violate national sovereignties; the WTO establishes trade rules that perpetuate the dependence of the peripheries. Wars of aggression, justified with democratic and humanitarian rhetoric, become the continuation of economic policy by military means, guaranteeing control of strategic resources and vital trade routes for capitalist accumulation.

In periods of organic crisis of the system, when the dominant bloc can no longer govern as before and the masses no longer want to be governed in the same way, bourgeois democracy tends to generate its own authoritarian "solutions". The rise of figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, or Milei does not represent an anomaly, but a structural response: fractions of capital and desperate social bases opt for an "anti-system" discourse, seeking to preserve the capitalist order through a firm hand and the systematic dismantling of hard-won rights. This phenomenon demonstrates that bourgeois democracy and fascism are not opposites, but Siamese twins: two forms of government of the bourgeoisie that alternate according to the depth of the crisis and the level of the class struggle.

Bourgeois democracy in Latin America: The cycle of dependence

In the specific context of Latin America, bourgeois democracy tends to operate as a particularly sophisticated mechanism of imperialist domination, updating the Monroe Doctrine and striving to consolidate the region's status as the "backyard" of the United States. The oligarchic capture of certain electoral processes is perhaps the defining element of this dynamic. Numerous local oligarchies, characterized by their weak national sentiment and their deep ties to transnational capital, possess the economic power necessary to mobilize votes on a large scale. They control the fundamental levers of public opinion: they own the major traditional media outlets and finance mass-reaching influence operations on social networks. This capacity allows them to install agendas, candidates, and interpretive frameworks that naturalize subordination to Washington's interests, presenting it as common sense or the only possible path.

The engineering of consensus is carried out through a veritable permanent psychological warfare. The oligarchic media construct symbolic realities that systematically portray nationalist or leftist candidates as "dangerous populists," "enemies of investment," or "allies of dictatorial regimes." Disinformation campaigns and fake news become a massive electoral weapon, designed to create climates of opinion based on fear and distortion that tip the balance in favor of pro-imperialist candidates. To this is added the judicialization of politics or lawfare, where the judicial system is instrumentalized to disqualify or weaken popular leaders who challenge the established order, while the impunity of local elites is shielded.

This complex framework generates a certain cyclical dynamic of dependence that operates with almost mechanical precision. In a first phase, progressive or nationalist governments come to power, generally after profound social crises, as was the emblematic case of Salvador Allende in Chile, who was democratically elected only to be overthrown by imperialist reaction. Immediately, they face multifaceted economic sabotage: capital flight, bosses' strikes, pressure from financial markets, and risk rating agencies. Not infrequently, limitations and errors, magnified exponentially by the media apparatus, progressively generate disillusionment in sectors of the population. In the next election, the oligarchic-media machinery drives victories for forces opposed and openly aligned with the United States. The cases of Mauricio Macri in Argentina after Kirchnerism, Jair Bolsonaro after the PT governments, or more recently, Javier Milei after Peronism, illustrate this recurring pattern.

Venezuela represents a paradigmatic case of revolutionary break with the traditional structures of the bourgeois state. The Bolivarian government initiated a permanent constituent process through the creation of communal councils, communes, and laws of popular power, seeking to dismantle traditional oligarchic structures and socialize the means of production through strategic nationalizations and enterprises of social property. In this, they have advanced significantly, generating increasingly broad popular support, in which the education of the people and the development of their patriotic and anti-imperialist sentiment have played a crucial role, as is clearly demonstrated in the face of the current serious threats from the United States in the Caribbean. Even so, this project has had to face significant structural contradictions that reveal the persistence of factors that tend to slow the ongoing advance of profound changes and the fierce imperialist counteroffensive that seeks to exploit vulnerabilities.

Bourgeois democracy in Latin America is thus characterized by a political fragmentation functional to imperialism. While sovereign integration projects—such as ALBA-TCP or UNASUR—are systematically sabotaged and often damaged by changes in government, integration subordinated to global value chains controlled by transnational capital is actively promoted. This deepens the historical role of the region as an exporter of raw materials and importer of manufactured goods, condemning it to a peripheral position in the international division of labor.

Faced with this, authentic regional integration is conceived despite national political and ideological differences, as demonstrated by the struggle against the FTAA, where Cuba and Venezuela played a crucial role, materializing the Martían ideal that "Homeland is Humanity."

Toward a participatory Democracy: The search for a radical alternative

Confronted with this bourgeois democracy that generates structural dependence, the paradigm of participatory or socialist democracy rises, proposing a radical redefinition of the very concept of power and sovereignty. Its fundamental objective is to overcome the essential delirium of bourgeois democracy: that which splits the individual between their condition as a citizen (formally free in the political sphere) and producer (exploited in the economic sphere). The material basis for this overcoming is the socialization of the means of production, extending democracy to the economic plane through mechanisms of participatory planning and establishing popular sovereignty over the strategic resources of the nation.

The mechanisms of this substantive democracy are articulated around the concept of direct popular power. Participation would no longer be limited to the act of electing, but would expand toward deliberation, governance, and permanent control through grassroots assemblies, popular councils, participatory budgets, and binding referendums. The imperative mandate and the revocability of positions would be instituted, guaranteeing that delegates are obligated spokespersons for their bases and not autonomous representatives, thus preventing the formation of a professional political caste disconnected from popular needs. Communication would cease to be a private business at the service of the oligarchy to become a democratic instrument under social control, oriented towards political education and the formation of a critical citizenry.

In this framework, national sovereignty and popular sovereignty are revealed as the two inseparable sides of the same coin. True independence from imperialism inexorably requires popular sovereignty over the economy. A participatory democracy is, by definition, anti-imperialist, as it transfers the power of decision from local oligarchies and foreign capital to the organized majorities. This integral democracy conceives participation not as an occasional right but as a permanent constituent process, where the people not only elect rulers but fundamentally construct their own collective destiny.

In this sense, the socialist phenomena of China and Vietnam must be studied as radical critical alternatives to the prevailing democratization criteria in the capitalist West. From the perspective of bourgeois democracy, these regimes are labeled authoritarian for not conforming to its multiparty and electoral forms. However, from the paradigm of participatory democracy expounded here, these countries can be interpreted as projects for the construction of alternative popular power systems, where democratization is measured not by electoral ritual, but by the capacity of the majorities to decide on the development model and the distribution of wealth. Their emphasis on national sovereignty, economic planning, and the eradication of poverty as substantive democratic achievements represents an explicit rejection of formal bourgeois democracy, proposing in its place an integration between political leadership and social participation that transcends the liberal framework.

Cuba: Historical laboratory of a sovereign alternative

In this theoretical and regional context, the Cuban experience represents a significant historical laboratory of resistance to the logic of dependent bourgeois democracy. Cuba is the only country in Latin America that has structurally broken with the cycle of pro-imperialist oligarchic governments. Its political system, with the Communist Party as the "leading superior force" and the organs of People's Power as instances of representation, was explicitly designed to eliminate the direct political influence of the oligarchy and foreign capital. It removes the political process from mass media manipulation and capitalist campaign financing, while guaranteeing a foreign policy of principles and regional integration based on solidarity (as exemplified by ALBA-TCP) and not on subordination.

Far from being dissociated concepts, in Cuba, participatory democracy and human rights constitute an indissoluble dialectical unity. True democracy is not limited to the formal respect of fundamental guarantees, but is defined by its active and tangible promotion, which demands the creation of material—economic, social, and cultural—conditions that allow their real and effective exercise by all the people, transforming abstract rights into concrete power.

However, the construction of this alternative is not without tensions and challenges. Cuba works to perfect its socialist system by increasingly reducing the gap between formal and effective participation to avoid the risk of bureaucratization and to ensure that the mechanisms of People's Power fully impact all crucial decisions of the country. The due balance between the unity essential for resistance against US aggression and openness to fundamental debates that revitalize the socialist project constitutes another permanent objective. The severe current economic crisis, exacerbated by the tightening of the US blockade, which causes profound harm to society, demands a continuous renewal of political and economic practices.

Beyond the crossroads

Bourgeois democracy thus reveals itself as a system of structural domination that, in the Latin American context, tends to operate as a mechanism functional to imperialist dependence. Its capacity to generate cycles of hope and frustration, to co-opt discontent and periodically reinstall governments aligned with the interests of transnational capital, demonstrates its efficacy as an instrument of hegemony. Faced with this reality, the Cuban experience is an option that embodies the tenacious search for a sovereign alternative. Its model, with all its challenges, proves that it is possible to escape the cycle of oligarchic domination, although it also shows the enormous complexity of building a genuine participatory democracy under conditions of underdevelopment and permanent imperial hostility. The fact that Cuba has sustained this sovereign project for over six decades is, in itself, a historical testimony to its resistance and capacity to preserve its independence.

The future of the region will depend crucially on the capacity of popular forces to synthesize the lessons from both the failures of the left within the framework of bourgeois democracy and the successes and limits of alternative experiences. The construction of a true democracy—integral, participatory, and sovereign—requires transcending the limits of the bourgeois state and advancing towards forms of political organization where power effectively resides in the organized majorities. It is not about perfecting the existing system, but about radically transforming it, extending democracy from the political to the economic sphere, from the formal to the substantive, from alienated representation to protagonistic participation. In this civilizational crossroads, the choice is not between different ways of administering the same system, but between perpetuating the democracy of capital or advancing towards the democracy of the peoples, understanding, as Fidel Castro signaled, that "... the Homeland is Latin America, it is the world where we live, it is Humanity. There will be only one Homeland, or there will be no Homeland worth having."

Bibliographic references:

1. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. (1848). The Communist Manifesto. [Foundational critique of the bourgeois state and its relation to class rule].
2. Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. [Analysis of the capitalist mode of production, commodity fetishism, and the economic base for political structures].
3. Gramsci, Antonio. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. [The concepts of hegemony, the integral state, and the role of civil society in maintaining capitalist domination].
4. Robinson, William I. (1996). Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. [Analysis of how "low-intensity democracy" and political intervention function to maintain neoliberal hegemony in the periphery].
5. Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. [The "propaganda model" explaining how media functions as an ideological apparatus in bourgeois democracies].
6. Galeano, Eduardo. (1971). Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. [A classic historical account of imperialist dependence and underdevelopment in Latin America].
7. Harnecker, Marta. (1999). Haciendo posible lo imposible: La izquierda en el umbral del siglo XXI [Making the Impossible Possible: The Left on the Threshold of the 21st Century]. [Analysis of leftist strategies, popular power, and challenges to bourgeois democracy in Latin America].
8. Zibechi, Raúl. (2012). Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements. [Exploration of new forms of autonomous, non-state political organization and power from below].