Julio César Guanche protecting individual interests. In another interpretation, while the republican tradition values democratic participation, it does not consider it an unshakable basic value. Even so, it understands it indispensable to promote the enjoyment of freedom (as non-domination) (Pettit 1999). For liberalism, negative freedom is a priority in that it responds to an individualistic conception of freedom that protects the independence and autonomy of the persons against the prescriptive interference of the public. This thesis protects pluralism more through the neutrality that is expected from the state than through citizen participation. Neutrality is presented as a commitment from the state, who renounces to uphold a particular conception of the good. The starting point is that no idea of the good is ontologically superior to another. The democratic character of the liberal state is valuable, then, for the way in which its capacity is limited to not intervene in individual decisions. In this way, it privileges the protection of private goods over the defence of the common good. The implementation of democratic republican ideals requires “tackling not only imperium —the relations of domination coming from state instances— but also, and especially, dominium, that is, relations of domination born out of dependency bonds rooted in the so-called civil world, which are, to a large extent, also the origin of imperium” (Casassas 2005, p. 239). Democratic republicanism recognises state intervention as necessary for the construction of a framework of freedom and establishes a range of problems the resolution of which is a responsibility of the state. As such, it promotes policies that favour the socioeconomic independence of citizens as the specification of its egalitarian ideal. Within the latter, the regulation of the fiduciary nature of property (that is, rights to property but also on its behalf, with social duties and functions that property has to comply with) is central to its agenda. The dispute over the access to citizenship as a right bearing status is linked, in this way, not only to the vocation of active participation, but to the practice of politics as an egalitarian ideal —between individuals with regards to the state and to other individuals— that needs the state in order to materialise. The recognition of social rights is necessary but not sufficient to ensure the material foundations of freedom, which republicanism locates in the material structures of society, such as the property regime, the organisation of production, and the regulation of labour. The republican perspective, however, has difficulties in understanding certain dimensions implicit in the processes of broadening or delimiting citizenship. Its emphasis on the latter as a universal value can affirm universalism at the price of constructing racially exclusive forms of social identity and promote cultural assimilation. The emphasis on locating the threats to politics’ egalitarian condition in the material structure of society does not always render visible how supposedly “cultural” issues, like racism, also become policies that restrict citizenship. The substantial commitment with public virtue and the common good can go along a “perfectionist” conception of politics —inattentive to societal pluralism and the evolution of contending identitarian projects. The defence of political values —which have to be shared by all— as the architecture of democracy can disavow the value of culture as the source of civic loyalties. These criticisms find adequate answers in light of the debate on citizenship as the interaction of dynamics of redistribution and recognition, for example, that I will not address here, however. In Cuban academic literature, the treatment of citizenship in Cuba on behalf of jurists has concentrated regularly on its condition as a status (Piorno Garcell, Cutíe Mustelier 2015), (Matilla Correa 2014), (Prieto Valdés 2013a), (Prieto Valdés 2013b). More recently, it has also been treated as a political practice. This is what Lorie Tapia has done to study the RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3 - © 2020 Author(s) 3