Report on Citizenship Law Cuba1 Julio César Guanche (Trans. Lucrecia Rubio Grundell) 1. Citizenship as status, active political practice and egalitarian content In this text, I use as a framework the debate between the conception of citizenship as a right bearing status, on the one hand, to which the liberal theory of citizenship ascribes, and republican theory’s approach to citizenship focused on political participation, on the other. 2 The republican conception of citizenship questions liberal theories for reducing citizenship to the condition of a status, adjusted to the individualistic conception of rights. For republicanism, there is a more demanding conception of democracy, with regard to citizenship: it is a rights status as much as an active political practice and an egalitarian ideal (Pettit 1999). The attempt to delimit or extend the number of people who possess the legal status of citizenship is of crucial importance. In the classic republican tradition —Isocrates, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero— only the sui iuris were citizens, those that could act on their own behalf in judicial acts. This capacity was determined by the legal and material sufficiency that one had to not be subjected to the will of another. While this is the nucleus of republicanism, —free is he who does not depend on another to live and is due only to the law— within it differences were elaborated depending on whether the political community was conceived as the legitimate private preserve of those already free, or whether the aim was to expand the number of citizens. Democratic republicanism considered democracy —after the experience of the Athenian plebeian revolution in the fifth century BC, with the governments of Epilates and Pericles— as broadening the access to the sphere of the free and equal. Athenian efforts abolished debt slavery and distributed land in order to increase the number of citizens. The project of redistributing freedom’s legal and material conditions is thus, until today, the sign of democratic republicanism. In contrast, the non-democratic republican tradition accepted the limitation of the number of citizens as necessary to protect the quality of the political 1 The text of this report includes some fragments taken from by doctoral dissertation (where I develop them extendedly) available in: http://repositorio.flacsoandes.edu.ec/bitstream/10469/12802/2/TFLACSO2017JCGZ.pdf 2 I choose this framework for my analysis, but I do not exclude the importance of other approaches. For example, the anthropological perspective on citizenship is very useful, (Lechner 1997), (Krotz 1997, Assies et al. 2002), as is the debate on the dimensions of redistribution and recognition in the construction of citizenship (Benhabib 2006); (Fraser 2006). RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3 - © 2020 Author(s) 1