Report on Citizenship Law: Cuba assumed afterwards (art. 46). Foreigners could not claim compensation for any damages the Cuban forces may have caused to them prior to the date on which their respective governments recognised the belligerence or independence of Cuba (art. 47). Part of this order, particularly that of Guáimaro, was questioned for being “civilist” and of little use in responding to the contingencies of the revolution. For example, Máximo Gómez, General in Chief of the Liberation Army expressed it as such: “those institutions (…) were the result and the work of the purest patriotism and the most finished democratic republicanism, in those sublime times of holy enthusiasm of a people, which seems counted more on the consciousness of its rights and the notoriety of its chains to triumph than with the strength of its canons” (Gómez 1916, p. 108). However, such order contained crucial tensions other than those specifically “political”. The abolition of slavery was disputed within the revolutionary domain, and a file such as the “freedmen regulation” “mediated” the issue, establishing patronage and the obligation to work for freedmen in exchange for food and clothing8 (Balboa Navarro 2003, p. 25). Despite the fact that the Liberation Army was a multiracial force, with blacks being the majority of members and 40% of the officers, racism did not cease to be a problem within the insurgent spectrum itself9. The issue re-emerged after the North American occupation of 1898, in order to define who was to be given Cuban citizenship. A constitutional project of Salvador Cisneros Bentancourt (1900) —who had served with honours in the revolutions of 1868 and 1895— sought to establish as Cuban citizens the Africans who had lived on the island for more than 25 years (art. 4), while foreigners were demanded, instead, “over ten years of being rooted in the country” (Cisneros Betancourt 1900, p. 9). Yet the most radical difference with the independentist constitutionalism is seen in texts such as the “Provisional Constitution of Santiago de Cuba, or of Leonard Wood”, of October 20th, 1898. During the occupation, an education reform and health programme took place, the Constituent Convention was prepared, and political parties were formed. At the same time, the Liberation Army and the Cuban Revolutionary Party created by José Martí were dissolved. The administration legislated for a country under occupation and translated such victory into rights from the liberal republican matrix characteristic of the United States: shielding some rights from the pressure exerted by other rights10. The text of 1898 established the political rights of peaceful assembly, freedom of religion, access to justice and protection of property. Likewise, it only regulated that “no private property will be taken for public use without due compensation” to its owners. Thus, subtracting the part of “civic function” that property had had within the insurgent constitutionalism and foreclosing the connection between the regulation of property and the 8 Slavery endured de facto in Cuba until 1886. Regarding the centrality of race in the Cuban war of Independence in its context, Ada Ferrer has written: “Once Cuba and the racial question are situated at the centre of the story new motivations, meanings and intervention dynamics, as well as new avenues to link the history of race with that of Empire, because it is very significant that, in an epoch of ascending racism, the United States would choose temper the victory of a multiracial and explicitly anti-racist movement!” (Ferrer 2011, pp. 5–20). 10 The democratic republican critique to the type of “liberal respect” towards citizenship rights specifies this point: there is a tension between rights and democracy (understood as collective political production), there where individual rights, without corresponding obligations, are used as trenches against the rights of the community, as only the former favour individual freedom. Liberalism, that proclaims itself as egalitarian via state neutrality, renounces egalitarianism when it protects the accumulation that comes from the exercise of created rights and prohibits the type of intervention that could avoid the consequences in the form of dispossession generated by the use of those same rights. 9 6 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3- © 2020 Author(s)