Report on Citizenship Law: Cuba one of dependence. It dispensed the Cuban political system with commitments to legitimacy, as the United States was safeguarded by the Platt Amendment. The mobilisation of the Cuban people defeated the intent of annexation but did not avoid the creation of a virtual “protectorate”, as referred to by the North Americans. “With regards to its interior regime, Cuba will be a sovereign nation, but from the international point of view it will be a state of the American Union” (Roig de Leuchsenring, Emilio 1939b, pp. 50–51). In 1902, 90% of the sugar trade —central to Cuban economic and social life— was destined to the United States, and dependence continued to reach these levels around 1930. However, the constitution of 1901 was celebrated by ample sections of Cuban society. The constituent Domingo Méndez Capote expressed: “Hopefully […] this page of our history that has just been written here, constitutes the solid, permanent, firm and stable base of the prosperous, free and blissful Cuban republic” (Roig de Leuchsenring, Emilio 1939a, pp. 72– 73). Of a liberal-individualist nature, the text is framed within the United States’ liberal republicanism, in contrast to the democratic republicanism that independentist constitutionalism had adhered to. It regulated civil and political rights at the most advanced level to date, such as those of assembly and association, prohibition of detention without warrant, and inviolability of the home and of correspondence. Also inspired by the North American tradition, it forged a strong presidentialism, a legal loophole for political caudillismo in Cuba, within a normative framework that did not intervene in relation to the causes supporting “caciquismo”, such as oligarchic landownership and the absence of social and political rights or the public provision of social resources. The Magna Carta similarly modelled a defective system of power division. It promised to promote the independence of the judicial power, through the creation of the Superior Court of Justice, whose members could not be removed from office except by impeachment. However, judicial power became dependent on the executive power, which appointed its most prominent officials. It also enshrined a hyperbolic territorial distribution, which would be a permanent source of corruption and of various institutions’ lack of quality, representativeness and effectiveness, such as the Senate and the provincial governors. In addition to an electoral system whose shortcomings —the partial bipartisanship of intra-oligarchic factions and the non-existence of an official register, among others— led to continuous electoral fraud. During the constitutional debate, the inclusion of democratic republican measures in the Magna Carta was proposed, such as the prohibition of foreigners from acquiring Cuban land —a measure that had a tradition in great figures such as José Martí y Manuel Sanguily. This measure sought to impede the advancement of a grave fact: between 1899 and 1900 about 7 thousand rural properties changed ownership in favour of North American investors, at extraordinarily low prices12. But the proposal did not prosper. Henceforth, the foreign depredation of Cuban land —and the imposition of mono-productive landownership regimes in terms of the use of land and labour—was a fundamental cause of three issues: a) the authoritarian, and often explicitly violent, profile of Cuban politics; b) the emptying out of citizenship as a political practice and its seclusion within the profile of a formal status; and, c) the emergence of serious social conflicts, such as the “race” war of 1912, which added a peasant uprising to protests against racial exploitation (Pérez, Louis A. Jr 2002), and against which the constitutional framework legitimised its bloody repression. Large landownerships —of national and foreign property— affected the practices of citizenship. Large estates were responsible for the ‘savanisation’ of Cuban territory, the 12 In the Cuban orient, "unlikely" transactions were recorded, such as the one made by the United Fruit Company, which bought 170,000 hectares for less than $ 200,000 (Zanetti Lecuona 2013). 8 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3- © 2020 Author(s)