Community‐Based Crime Control in Cuba

Abstract

Cuba has long had one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America and in the Americas generally. Incidents of crime against women such as rape and domestic violence, for example, appear to be lower in Cuba than in the rest of Latin America and the United States. Community organizations in Cuba play a significant role in controlling criminal activity by generating and sustaining citizen participation, generating an understanding of the nature of community crime, and helping to form partnerships for community policing. Cuba has attempted to obtain citizen participation in order to resolve social problems, including crime, by instilling a sense of community among its citizens and providing them with the structure of mass organizations that mobilize people on local, regional, and national levels. Residents attribute Cuba’s relatively low crime rate to the sense of community created and maintained by such mass organizations. This article focuses on the role that mass organizations and especially Committees for the Defense of the Revolution play in the Cuban experience of community policing and justice.

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