Report on Citizenship Law: Cuba demanded cultural recognition and material redistribution, and created the crime of discrimination for the first time in Cuban constitutional history. The 1940 Constitution also modelled, for the first and only time in Cuban institutional history, a semi-parliamentary regime. This regime has recently been qualified as “attenuated presidentialism” (Pérez Hernández 2016, pp. 94-95). The system was characterised by the absence consecutive presidential re-election and a waiting period of eight years before being able run again, with the figure of a prime minister (it would be one of the ministers, with or without portfolio, appointed by the president) and with cooperation mechanisms among all public powers to moderate the weight of the Executive. This system has long been questioned as ineffective. Also, it did not alter the political-territorial structure and thus reissued the problems that this posed to the apparatus of political representation. It maintained the tripartition of powers and did not modify the representative system (against proposals to create “functional” institutions, such as a corporate senate), and it created new institutions for the protection of rights —the Court of Constitutional and Social Guarantees— and expanded the use of the appeal of unconstitutionality, for example, to the contentious-administrative area. The 1940 Constitution had enemies. Important sectors of the so-called “living classes” clamoured against it. Willard L. Béaulac, United States vice-consul, accused the constituent assembly of “violating the mandate of its people”, of “attacking the sovereignty of its members”, of being “tyrannical” and “contrary to democracy” (Report of George S. Meeresmith to the Secretary of State, July 18). Some of these actors described the 1940 Constitution as a “communist triumph”, and as having “socialist” content. The text was a partial defeat, an undesirable result, for the previously almighty Cuban oligarchy and for American banking and sugar interests. As had happened in 1901, the accessory legislation that had to complement, develop and enforce the content of the constitution had great shortcomings. According to one calculation, a decade after the 1940 text was enacted, only ten of the seventy special laws pending had been issued (Rasco 1991, p.125). On the other hand, the agrarian reform — which was included in the text of 1940— did not take place until 1959 and the prohibition of large landownership turned out to be a dead letter, as its structure was not modified until then. Other constitutional articles defended oligarchic interests for other areas: they limited the taxation work of municipal governments and protected foreigners with regards to the servicing of debt. United States diplomats considered that the most radical constitutional contents would bring “psychological rather than real effects” (Report of Willard L. Béaulac to the US Secretary of State, June 26). The 1940 Constitution was the result of the revolutionary and reformist pressure that propelled the 1930-1933 revolution. For the sectors involved in it far from enabling the diverse representation of the social was a barrier against such diversity in favour of the old oligarchy. The liberal oligarchic format was not democratic but a substitute for democracy, in so far as it structured the dissociation between political power and the people, between the State and the nation. The questioning that the oligarchic and “caudillista” containment of politics in Cuba received was not against “democracy” but to “old politics”. The questioning of “liberal democracy” by “populist” actors was not based on the contestation and the ignorance of what they considered to be the virtues of liberal democracy (they did not impugn universal suffrage, the weight of public opinion, the separation of powers, nor the virtue of limited government or the supremacy of parliament), but on its defects. The matter is of capital importance as the revolutionary and reformist proposals sought to “complete the republic”, correcting the problems of liberal democracy, but not to dismount it, and even less, to substitute it. The slogan had been expressed graphically by 12 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3- © 2020 Author(s)