Report on Citizenship Law: Cuba naturalised Cuban citizens received a document called a “Citizenship card”. On the other hand, establishing the word “discrimination” in the constitutional text had concrete consequences for citizenship as status and practice. It meant extracting the problem of racism from the “moral” sphere, opening the doors to its social considerations and its legal sanction and granting it more power to situate itself within complex discourses like that of “Cubanism”. It enabled, for example, to legally sanction acts of discrimination and — potentially— to launch affirmative action policies towards black Cubans. How this “worked” in practice, what stands out for our approach here, specifically, is that the act gave a completely new role to state intervention in the pursuit of justice in Cuba, in this case racial justice. The approval of discrimination as a crime also allowed the adoption of concrete responses to a problem that bedevilled many Cuban families, particularly of colour, among whom formal marriage was much less frequent than in white families: the prohibition of distinguishing between natural and illegitimate children. According to testimonies of the time, this was a “wound” in the heart of the nation, which amounted to a “second class citizenship” for natural children. The validity of this Constitution was interrupted in 1952, by a new coup d’état by Fulgencio Batista. In the meantime, as the conditions that would allow for the expansion of rights were not structurally transformed, the possibilities of new participants exercising political life with higher quality were limited. Thus, along with social advances in the fields of work and consumption, patronage relations and corrupt state logics were maintained. The military coup of Fulgencio Batista (March 1952) cancelled the Constitution and fought the political and social rights enshrined in it. In addition, economic policy followed different channels to those the 1940 Constitution sought to privilege (economic diversification, pluralisation of productive actors and defence of consumers and workers). The recovery of the 1940 Constitution was one of the main flags of the broad political field that triumphed over the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s. It reached a point in which, once the revolutionary triumph of 1959 had taken place, the Fundamental Law of the Republic of 1959 restored the validity of the 1940 text, and part of its contents were formally maintained until 1976, while others, like certain civil and political rights, were cancelled or restricted. 5. Citizenship in Cuban constitutionalism between 1959 and 1976 The Cuban insurrection of the 1950s saw the political and social recovery of the democratic Republic as one of its foundations. Martí, the “intellectual author of the attack on the Monacada Barracks” (1953), had argued for “a pluralist democracy, a stable republic”. Bonds of one thousand Cuban pesos issued by the July 26th Revolutionary Movement to raise funds for the revolution contained allegories of the Republic. José Antonio Echeverría, leader of the March 13th Revolutionary Directorate, assured that the revolution laid “the structural bases of the new republic, sovereign in its right, fair to all its children, honoured in the men who serve it, prosperous and secure in its economy, projected towards a universal culture with its own characteristics and oriented towards the fulfilment of its American destiny”. Fidel Castro had affirmed (1953): “the problems of the Republic can only be solved if we dedicate ourselves to fight for it with the same energy, honesty and patriotism that our liberators invested in creating it” (Castro Ruz 2007, p.42). After 1959, the March 13th Revolutionary Directorate demanded the extirpation of “everything immoral, dirty and ugly that stains the honesty, uprightness and beauty of our revolutionary republic, free and sovereign”. Fidel Castro asserted that “the Republic requires a good surgical operation and if we start spreading onto it 16 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3- © 2020 Author(s)