Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 58

The Pittsburgh connection is two fold. The City
has itself adopted deliberative practices in one
way or another over the past 10 years. These have
involved outside groups like AmericaSpeaks and
EveryDay Democracy as well as home grown
centers like Carnegie Mellon’s Program for Deliberative Democracy. In 2013 the area also
hosted a series of workshops and art events for the
visiting Cuban delegation, members of which
wanted to establish a line of communication between, among others, those working to make
Cuba more democratic and those in our area
working to make our local democracy more deliberative. Influential in bringing these groups together were Juan Antonio Alvarado, who now
edits the journal IDENTIDADES, and CMU’s
Kenya Dworkin, who has seen a decades old connection between “Da burgh” and the Cuban community.
The connections continued this year with a second visit and the publication by Cuesta Morua of
“Constitutional Debate and Citizens” in the Journal IDENTIDADES. These Cuban’s get it, as
does our Mayor Peduto, who endorsed the recommendation that Pittsburgh become a center for deliberative democracy.

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Both have followed up with action, with workshops and neighborhood roundtables in Cuba and
deliberative forums in the City’s Public Safety
Council meetings, discussions that engaged our
citizens in the selection process for the new Chief
of Police.
Benjamin Barber has written recently that the
dysfunction seen at the national and even state
level of our democracy has called us back the cities where real decision-making needs to take on a
realistic tone and where real citizen engagement
can make a difference. Cities, he writes, are the
“theatres of strong democracies.” Through its use
of deliberative forums, online tools like MindMixer and Next Door, and participatory budgeting, Pittsburgh can serve as a model for other
cities, and, yes, even other countries.
Like Cuba.
*Editor's Note: Article first appeared with the
same title in: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
19 December 2014.
Accessed at:
http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2014/12/19/Pittsburgh-goes-to-Cuba-RobertCavalier-democracy/stories/201412190027.