Report on Citizenship Law: Cuba
apparatus accumulated power, which made the socialist state grow in proportion, influence
and in the degree of programming of social life. At the same time, it developed social rights
and framed in a more limited manner civil and political ones, conditioned by their exercise
within state institutions and officially recognised social organisations, and ‘in accordance
with the aims of a socialist society”. From this locus, the concept of Revolution substituted
that of the Republic in official discourse.
Cuba’s “provisional” period was the longest within the socialist field in the twentieth
century. The fact collides with the republican formula of the precedence of Law, against
political “decisionism” by decree. The reason for the delay of a new constitution —no
elections were held during this period—was explained in this way: “[...] The Directorate of
the Revolution did not hasten to establish its definitive form, understanding that the issue was
not based on the formal existence of the organs of power, but in creating well-thought-out and
lasting institutions that respond to needs” (Official Gazette 1944, p.163). The idea followed
the Soviet “Marxist-Leninism” philosophy of the time: Constitutions are declarations of
existing realities and do not have a constitutive character, that is, they must ‘reflect the
changing economic-social reality and, based on it, influence its transformation and the
acceleration of its development according to its own material nature and the historical
(ideological) socialist project” (Gómez Treto 1987, P. 52).
Hence, the fundamental law “must” legally consolidate the “already achieved”. The
thesis brought as a result, for its future, four changes: a) the scarce use of the constitutional
text as a rule to limit the rights of power and to assign rights against power; b) the limited
deployment of the normative force of the rights recognised in the Constitution; c) the scarce
utility of the law to express and relaunch axiological debates on aspirations of new contents of
freedom, dignity, justice and solidarity; and d) the consolidation of the concentrated exercise
of power that would be formalised after the creation of the new institutions in 1976. When
such text was promulgated, fundamental characteristics of the Cuban political system had
already taken shape: a single communist party, a state economy, a Marxist-Leninist ideology
and an alliance with the socialist field.
Because of these features, the model has received criticisms such as the following:
“the resignification of the values of equality and freedom determines that citizenship has
ceased to be the central criterion of unification and integration of the new Cuban socialist
society, opening the way for notions of revolutionary and people as synonyms of citizen and
electoral majority” (Bobes 1996) And, also: “The revolution (identifies) the civil or political,
the people and the government, the nation and the State. To the point that, in the preamble of
the 1976 constitution, the Cuban citizen, that is, the civil individual, appears as the defender
of “the victorious doctrine of Marxism-Leninism”, “proletarian internationalism”, and
“fraternal friendship”, with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries” (Rojas 1997).
However, the Socialist Constitution of the Republic of Cuba was approved in 1976 by
97.7% of the votes of the Cuban electorate, resident on the island. According to Matilla, the
new constitution “is not a work of political and ideological diversity, but the work of the
political and ideological unity created by the evolution of the Cuban revolutionary process,
led by the Communist Party of Cuba” (Matilla (coord.) 2016, p.9). The text resolved in the
normative domain the problem of the fusion of powers and functions characteristic of the
“provisional” period. Three fundamental objectives were raised: to regularise the decisionmaking process, to decentralise state power, and to consecrate the catalogue of citizen rights.
On the other hand, the social policies developed since the beginning of the
revolutionary process —agrarian reform, urban reform, universalisation of free education and
health, protected prices for public services and food, mass access to public cultural facilities
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RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3- © 2020 Author(s)