Report on Citizenship Law: Cuba
which needs public action in order to materialise. Therefore, the recognition of social rights is
necessary but not sufficient to ensure the material foundations of freedom, which
republicanism locates in the material structure of society, such as the property regime, the
organisation of production and the regulation of labour.
From this framework, I have analysed the legal regulation of citizenship in Cuban
constitutionalism and its practical performances in their respective periods. I have described
independence constitutionalism as democratic republican. This is for treating citizenship as a
status as well as a civic practice, conceiving it as an egalitarian ideal, committing to protect
citizenship as the repository of sovereignty against the government; engaging with republican
cosmopolitanism, and regulating property in relation to the abolition of slavery and the right
to distributed property.
I have identified the 1901 Constitution as liberal republican. I recorded the way in
which it collected part of the pro-independence program, for example, with the establishment
of male universal suffrage (for over 21 years) and how it regulated civil and political rights at
the most advanced level at that time, while not intervening in the causes that sustained
“caciquismo”, like the oligarchic large landownerships and the lack of social rights and of
public provision of social resources. I questioned that in the field of social rights, it regulated
limited content, specifically in education, and that the rules on property were limited to shield
the exclusive and exclusionary nature of private property.
I have placed the 1940 Constitution as ascribing democratic republicanism, because it
established a broad catalogue of political and social rights and guarantees: the right to strike,
the habeas corpus, the universal and obligatory vote, the freedom of association and
expression, of worship and word, business and trade, the secular state, together with broad
social, cultural, labour and family protection legislation. In unison, I explained that it
established the principle of state intervention in the economy; the legal regulation of leases,
the limitation of large estates, the abolition of censuses and the restriction of land ownership
to foreigners, universal male and female suffrage. On the other hand, I argued that it defended
racial justice as a problem that demanded cultural recognition and material redistribution,
created for the first time in Cuban constitutional history the crime of discrimination, and
endorsed the principle of the social function of property. Then, I located the way in which the
dimension of citizenship as an active practice traversed into 1940, and how it benefited the
nationality of Cubans.
I have argued how the process of achieving the revolutionary triumph in 1959 had its
origin in the struggle for the social and political recovery of the Republic. However, I have
explained that the synonyms used between “the republican” and the “existing republic
between 1902 and 1958”, cancelled “that republic” as a symbolic reference. I described that
the Cuban institutional culture developed a “square under siege” consciousness, within which
the state apparatus accumulated great power, at the same time as it amply developed social
rights and framed in a more limited way civil and political ones, conditioned by their exercise
within state institutions and officially recognised social organisations. I concluded that from
such logic, the concept of Revolution substituted in the official discourse that of Republic.
However, I have identified expressly democratic republican content in such order: the
embodiment of the ideals of social justice, struggle for freedom, national independence and
defence of the sovereignty of the people, the priority of the public interest over private ones in
relations and regulation of the system of “popular power”, as a form of the Cuban State. Also,
I have discussed the deficiencies that this system presents in practice, such as the absence of
referendums, the lack of exercise of popular legislative initiatives and the conditionality of the
practice of rights, which subordinated their exercise to the framework of officially recognised
26
RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3- © 2020 Author(s)