Julio César Guanche Fernando Ortiz since the 1920s: “we have to republicanise Cuba”. With that phrase, he referred to “a program of public actions denouncing government corruption and requesting efficient political, social, economic and legal reforms to stop the risk of state bankruptcy” (Cairo, p.43). In 1939 there were twelve political parties in Cuba. The bulk of them were described as “institutions created to satisfy group ambitions”. The cause of the problem was located in “individualism, so characteristic of Cuban personality” (García Mayo 1940). They were accused of being dominated by an “absolute lack of ideology” and of legislating in their own interest. Corruption continued to be an evil incarnated in political life. Several discourses found their cause in structural factors, and not just in “moral” judgments. They understood that bureaucracies were the livelihood of the Cuban middle classes: easy work, quick enrichment, a scenario of impunity and their lack of insertion in the national economy, were factors that, together, made “the Cuban of the middle class a being that vegetates in public office in order to subsist” (García Mayo 1940). Professional politicians were denounced for working for vested interests and for themselves17. Given the above, the institutional system was useless for different relevant social sectors: for some it was insufficient to correct imperium (the exclusionary political power of the oligarchical “caciquismo” or the political parties that represented it), for others it was incapable of attacking dominium (the despotic private power of capitalist companies or of capitalist landlords). If “productive’ capitalist sectors, and professional and intellectual sectors, had a problem of control over the political system —with regards to the old oligarchy—the popular sectors were excluded. The reaction to this was to dispute the notion of democracy, in order to make it more inclusive. Those critical of oligarchic liberalism included diverse social actors such as the “productive” bourgeoisie, medium and small bourgeois sectors, professional sectors and workers, and by parties so different from each other like the PRC (A), sectors of the Liberal Party, the ABC, the Communist Party, and Fulgencio Batista. These groups were all critics of “old politics” —considered to be the source of despotism. Despotism originated in the concentration of both public and private power: "The individual is a fugitive, or rather, a displaced person of its own creation. However, the liberal-democratic state remained, to ironically console him, which, with its principle of non-intervention in private businesses, allowed the new economic powers (banking and super-industry) to evict the individual” (ABC 1934, p.14). This thesis understood that the practice of freedom —among individuals with regards to state power and private powers— needed the active participation of citizens. In this way, the ABC, the magazine Carteles and other actors advocated mandatory voting; the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Authentic) called for the exclusion of amnesties for political crimes, to protect the quality of suffrage; and the Communist Party made an active mass campaign in search of the popular vote for the Constituent Assembly, supported as the right to strike as “sacred”, and the demand to vote at age 18, to expand the electorate (Alfonso Roselló, page 43). At the same time, they considered that the state should be able to act in favour of collective interests. With this, they defended an expanded conception of freedom, not limited to the “negative” enjoyment of rights. The argument had explicit democratic republican 17 The number of legislative projects submitted to the House of Representatives in the mid-1930s was estimated at 500, a very important part of which had this destiny: it "stagnates or falls asleep or volatilises" in the congressional course (1936, p. 33). RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3 - © 2020 Author(s) 13