From our point of view, the change made to the reform clause does not proscribe a total reform, nor must this necessarily imply totally re-constructing the political and social order established in the Constitution. This is about a new text, to introduce profound shifts in the structure of the state, in particular in its higher bodies. There is a broadening of the range of rights, which make it different from the current Constitution, without losing its socialist nature and essence.

Another question raised was that a constituent assembly should be convoked. From our point of view, this would directly contravene the reform clause which gives the National Assembly constituent authority. In addition to this, there is no break from the past, but rather changes within political and social continuity.

We should emphasize several general questions that stand out upon reading the draft. Reaffirmed is the socialist nature of the political, economic, and social system. This acknowledgement is not enough, but rather that identifying features of this concept are visible, to which specifics have been added that in no way devalue this.

The role of the Communist Party is maintained as a guiding element in society and the state, emphasizing its democratic character and necessary link with the people. Some positions have attempted to counterpoise the role of the Party and popular sovereignty, and the state powers afforded to each one of the bodies defined in the Constitution.

The first point to be raised is that the Party is not placed above the Constitution; as a political entity it is obligated to abide by and defend it. Likewise, in its activity, the Party does not take the place of state or administrative bodies, since these have powers and jurisdictions defined in the Constitution and by law.

Specified in the text are the humanist values of social justice and respect for human dignity that characterize our socialism. The recognition of Cuba as a socialist state of law is emphasized. This affirmation is not a simple, complacent statement. It expresses the determination and will to attain the rule of law and the supreme character of the Constitution, within the framework of a socialist state.

One item that leads to an important re-ordering is that related to regulation of the economic system. Maintained as a principle is the socialist ownership, by the entire people, of the fundamental means of production – I repeat: fundamental – and the planned direction of the economy, along with recognition of the role of the market. This is not about market socialism, but rather considering the market within the framework of a system of planning, which, of course, will need to have greater flexibility.

The recognition of private property, among the different forms of property, has attracted attention. The Constitution does not create it, it has existed. The changes introduced in the economic model, derived from agreements reached at the Sixth and Seventh Party Congresses, make viable the existence of this form of property, which goes beyond what has been called self-employment, since the possibility of hiring a workforce is in place. What is significant is that private property does not distinguish the model, or predominate. It is also necessary in certain activities, with appropriate regulation and control. The draft includes the prohibition on the concentration of property in the hands of individuals or non-state incorporated entities, with the goal of preserving “limits compatible with socialist values of equity and social justice.”

Changing the concept of marriage has also been controversial, as the current definition which addresses marriage between a man and a woman is to be abandoned, and in its place the statement that marriage is between two persons, which opens the way for the possibility of same-sex marriage.

It was decided to maintain this formulation and assume the challenge of the new concept, knowing that its inclusion could generate disagreements for cultural reasons, prejudice, and stereotypical visions that do not change overnight.

If the Constitution proclaims the full recognition of the right to equality, why should people of different sexual orientations be prevented from establishing a marriage? Must this concept continue to be anchored in visions that have already been surpassed over time, or can we modify it and recognize this right, as is occurring gradually around the world?

Different positions on this issue include preferring to maintain the concept in the current Constitution; those who favor the formulation proposed in the draft; those who accept the civil recognition of established unions but not marriage; others who support the proposal but limit the right to adoption; and lastly those who advocate a concept that includes “two or more persons.” Thus, a variety of opinions which must be evaluated, like others, with the rigor and depth required.

In our opinion, the law cannot remain perpetually enslaved to backward social attitudes, even when, at some point, it may collide with part of the social spectrum. Given its transformational mission, the law must also spur development. This is not the first time we have faced these challenges. We can recall historical conflicts about women’s right to vote, the acceptance of divorce, or, in our case, incorporating equal rights for men and women, and equal responsibility for both spouses, as established in our Family Code.

Some economic and social rights, which cannot be guaranteed immediately for economic reasons beyond the will of the state, and that would make the Constitution fictitious, are included with a gradual projection, which likewise generates some disagreement. This is the case with the right to a dignified dwelling, the right to food, the right to water, among others.

The formula used requires the state to work toward fully guaranteeing these rights, but from our point of view, these cannot be established categorically given the objective limitations on their attainment.

Local People’s Power bodies are also the object of transformation in the draft. At the provincial level, People’s Power Assemblies are eliminated, and in their place, a government including a Governor and Provincial Council is proposed. This government, led by the Governor, would additionally include the presidents of Municipal Assemblies and Superintendents in charge of municipal administrations.

This structure is considered more functional and appropriate to the characteristics of the provinces as territorial coordination entities, and looks to further strengthen municipalities. One question to be analyzed, on the basis of proposals made to date (during the consultation), is if the Governor should be appointed or elected.

Municipalities acquire greater power. It is no accident that some have seen them as “winners” in the draft. Recognition of their autonomy and stronger relations between the community and its representatives distinguish the text presented.

We must understand the document as what it is: a draft proposal. The text is not definitive. It is perfectible. It is not the work of a commission or a group. It is a collective work, and the future Constitution is being constructed with the contribution of the entire people.

Without vanity, we can affirm that we are immersed in a unique exercise of real, effective democracy, of an equally exemplary constituent process, with the people as the true protagonist. The outcome thus far is considered very positive. In addition to contributing to the future Constitution, the consultation has served to expand the people’s legal and political culture.

Once the process is concluded, the drafting commission will evaluate each proposal, including doubts expressed by our citizens. No opinion will be left out of consideration. This, of course, does not mean that every recommendation will become part of the text, since there are dissimilar and even contradictory suggestions.

After this complex, arduous work, the commission will present a new draft to the National Assembly, from where the final Constitution of the Republic will emerge, and be submitted to a popular vote. Therefore, the text agreed upon by consensus and popular participation will have a high level of legitimacy. Every Cuban can be proud of our Constitution.

Once the new Carta Magna has been proclaimed in effect, the perfecting of the country’s legal system will be required. The Constitution alone is not enough. An updating of our legal structure will be needed, and for thus an intense legislative effort.

- Excerpts from presentation by Homero Acosta, Council of State Secretary, opening the 2018 International Legal Congress.

(Granma)

Cuban health collaborators providing their services in 66 countries will actively participate in the debate on the draft Constitution of the Republic, Deputy Director for Cuba’s Central Medical Cooperation Unit (UCCM) Jorge Delgado told Cuban television reporters.

Delgado assured that the necessary organizational conditions have been created to conduct the process, including providing the relevant documents and establishing a timeframe for Cuban doctors, nurses, and health technicians to adequately prepare to participate in the process where they live or work.

Preparatory meetings have also been held, and the training of two-person teams who will moderate the discussions conducted, the UCCM official explained.

SUBMITTING ONLINE PROPOSALS FROM ABROAD

• Accents should not be used when entering information. The letter ñ is allowed (code Alt+64).

• The passport number does not need to be in use, details of an expired passport may be entered should the user not currently have a valid passport.

•The passport number consists of a letter and six numbers. There should be no spaces entered between the characters.

• Any name acquired through marriage with someone who is not Cuban should not be included as a second name.

• Paragraph numbers must match the 755 paragraphs in the draft Constitution.

• In the “Observations” section, any clarifications or comments that complement the proposals made can be included.

• The page includes security controls to prevent automated submissions. Users must type the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) code shown in order to submit their proposals. The code is not case sensitive.

• The term “Category” describes any proposal aimed at removing, including, or changing words or phrases of a paragraph. The different categories are as follows:

Modification: Any proposal aimed at removing, including or changing words or phrases in a paragraph.

Addition: The inclusion of a new paragraph with an idea that does not already appear in the text. In this case, in paragraph number, 0 (zero) must be entered.

Elimination: Proposed exclusion of a paragraph as unnecessary or due to opposition to its content.

Doubt: In the case of paragraphs, sentences or phrases that are not understood, result in confusion or generate uncertainty.

• Users’ names, first surnames, date of birth, passport number, sex, country of permanent or temporary residence, the paragraph number, category and opinions are all mandatory fields.

(Granma)

The analysis conducted by the National Assembly of People’s Power of the constitutional proposal now being considered by citizens included as one of its most intense moments the issue of whether or not the Constitution should explicitly declare that limiting the concentration of wealth is the responsibility of the state – defined as socialist and true to Martí’s precept, “The first law of our republic: the devotion of Cubans to the full dignity of man.”

First of all, it must be recalled that consensus emerged on this limitation during the broad debates held among millions of Cubans on the Guidelines for economic and social development, approved by the Sixth and Seventh Congresses of the Communist Party of Cuba, and the Conceptualization of the Economic and Social Model, in the initial version of which the idea was not present. Its inclusion was the product of a demand from the grassroots level and several delegates proposed it.

The responses I was able to hear from members of the drafting Commission – which by the way did an excellent job both in the introduction by the Council of State Secretary and the proposal presented – who spoke in the National Assembly explaining why private property is recognized in the new Constitution, and its concentration limited, and the concentration of wealth is also limited. They outlined arguments that gave the impression of confusing accumulation with concentration. This was the case when responses cited the example of athletes or musicians who earned significant amounts of money with their talents, accumulating wealth, but do not concentrate it, since they did not take it from anyone. On the contrary, they contribute to the country, usually bringing their wealth here, as a product of their work abroad.

Concentration supposes a process in which something is moved from various places to a single one, or to few from many others. We know from the most elementary precepts of political economy that the contradiction between the increasingly social nature of work and increasingly greater concentration of capital (wealth), which is created as a result, is the dynamic of capitalism, and a society that aspires to be an alternative to this should not limit the accumulation of wealth, but rather its concentration, since it is assumed that in the process of concentration someone (many) lose, and socialism should be a society without losers. The role of the state, therefore, is essential, with its policies functioning as redistributors of wealth created by all economic actors, including those based on private property, without falling into paternalism or egalitarianism, since we already know, from our own experience, the damage and deformations these cause.

In a world in which the problem is very serious, and has led to only eight persons with more wealth that half of the planet’s poorest, and that in Latin America only 32 individuals have concentrated as much wealth as
300 million inhabitants across the region, there are increasingly more people calling for limitations on this, and they aren’t communists or socialists. According to the organization Oxfam, this high level of concentration is the result of public policies that have benefitted the financial system, not only in the acquisition of properties.

Some interpretations – perchance – from the same sources that regularly condemn every step taken by the Cuban government a priori, for ideological reasons, have cited prejudices against private enterprise – recognized in the proposed Constitution – as the cause of this limitation on the concentration of wealth. But this is not necessarily so.
While legal norms for small and medium-sized private capital businesses have yet to be established, recent regulations announced on the issue cannot be interpreted as a definitive rejection of these, but rather as an adaptation to the temporary existence of distortions in Cuba’s current economic situation, including dual exchange rates, numerous subsidies, and a deficient financial apparatus, which have given some private entrepreneurs a rate of profit much higher than any Cuban state enterprise, and higher than that of similar businesses in other countries. This is the only way to explain the flow of “investment” in this sector from abroad, in search of profit rates that cannot be obtained in the free enterprise capitalism existent in Miami, and which led to a source far removed from Cuban socialism, the Spanish newspaper El País, commenting, “The majority of 11 million Cubans are seeing the birth of a duty-free bourgeoisie.” You don’t have to be a soothsayer to recognize that once these distortions are overcome – dual exchange rates and generalized subsidies of products and services, as opposed to subsidizing specific persons – and the financial system improved, conditions will be created to move forward with the formal recognition of small and medium sized private business as established in the Constitution.

But the warning against concentration of wealth is not necessarily directed solely toward private enterprise, but should, I believe, be a cardinal principle of state management and socialist enterprise. Seeing as necessary a limit on the concentration of property and “wealth” as referring only to great fortunes, does not address situations like the creation of more than 20,000 jobs as telecommunications agents, which could have benefitted single mothers, older adults living alone, and the disadvantaged by providing them simple, basic work with relatively good income, instead of providing this opportunity to the highest bidder, on more than a few occasions, the owner of an already prosperous business – a café, a CD stand, etc – or the families of those working for state enterprises with the highest average salaries, who now sell prepaid phone cards next door to a disabled person who could benefit from honorable work, appropriate for their condition, and that would help the state which is allocating resources to support such citizens, and thus benefit more Cubans.

Such realities justify the inclusion of another issue in the Constitution, related to the social objectives of state enterprises that should not be socialist in name only. An entity cannot be called socialist when, far from working to reduce inequity, its practices reinforce it, or when it exploits socially disadvantaged Cubans, risking their health and that of the community.

Technical responses to questions that are also political and ethical do not befit a country like Cuba, educated by Fidel for more than 50 years. The people are discussing a Constitution that assumes the ideas of Martí and Fidel will surely take into consideration something that the leader of the Cuban Revolution said early on, in January of 1959: “The laws of the Cuban Revolution are fundamentally moral principles.”

An aspect as important as the elimination of discrimination against non-heterosexual persons in terms of the right to marriage was supported by consensus in the National Assembly debate, and we can only feel proud of the maturity achieved by our society on this plane, and of the depth and solidity of the arguments presented in favor of this humanist decision that will surely contribute to its comprehension among the majority in our country, and hopefully convince those who have expressed their opposition.

“No one knows what communism is,” they say, but surely it includes the end of all discrimination. The discussion of this proposed Constitution is directed toward defending a country that is diametrically opposed to capitalism, which we know only too well, well enough to attempt to distance our future as far away as possible, while remembering that it reigns in the world today and that we must consider this reality for our development.

(Granma)

Still several months away is the proclamation of the country’s new Constitution, one of the world’s most modern, as specialists in the field have said, given the additions proposed by the commission charged with writing the first draft, which was subsequently approved by the National Assembly of People’s Power.

Nonetheless, already taking shape among Cubans is the document that will provide the country a useful economic, political, and social order, and protect citizens’ rights: the new Cuban Constitution.

But what is the route to proclamation of this new Constitution?

Granma summarizes the steps to be taken…

1. Popular consultation meetings are held, in which citizens express their opinions and suggest changes to the proposed draft:

- 135,000 meetings between August 13 and November 15

- The Cuban people will meet in workplaces, schools, and communities – and may participate in more than one meeting.

2. Processing of proposals is conducted by the Center for Socio-political Studies and Opinion:- The proposed Constitution consists of a preamble and 224 articles, divided into 11 titles, 24 chapters and 16 sections.- To assist in the analysis and processing of opinions, each paragraph has been numbered, a total of 755.- Two-person teams leading meetings will be responsible for the minutes. All proposals made by the population will be taken into account. No votes will be conducted; all are to be recorded in the minutes.- The proposals may be:- Modification: A suggestion to add, replace, or delete a phrase or word in a paragraph.- Addition: A proposal to add a new paragraph because the the idea is not stated in the draft.- Elimination: A proposal to eliminate a paragraph because the citizen considers it unnecessary or does not agree with the content.- Clarification: A request for clarification when the citizen believes an idea expressed in a paragraph is not clear or understandable.3. Submission of proposals to the Commission in charge of preparing the draft Constitution:- Within 48 hours of each meeting, those who took minutes must deliver them to the municipal team, which organizes the information in the form of proposals. The provincial team meets and forwards proposals to the national team.- Proposals will be organized by paragraph, clearly and precisely- Finally, a Proposal Report will be prepared, which will be submitted to the Constitutional Reform Commission, for the evaluation of proposals and the re-writing of the document as deemed necessary4. The document returns to the National Assembly:

- The amended text is returned to the National Assembly for a final discussion and is submitted to a vote for approval.

5. A referendum is called

- The Council of State, in accordance with the National Assembly decision, orders the publication of a convocation for a referendum in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Cuba, and appoints members of the National Electoral Commission

6. Referendum

- The text is submitted for approval in a referendum via a direct, secret ballot vote by citizens.

7. Proclamation

- Upon receiving the people’s backing, the Constitution is proclaimed and as of that moment becomes the law of the land in Cuba.

(Granma)