Translated By Google:
Intro-
Otto’s War Room is a member of “Red de Blogs Comunistas,”
–a communist blog network. So this is an article from
that same outfit I’m connected to. I just came back from Cuba a few weeks ago, so this is a coincidence
and it is very helpful to me, since while I was in Cuba, the caravan delegation I was
with met with members of The National Assembly of People's Power. While we covered a lot about the new constitution, we mostly
discussed how it was put together rather than what is actually in it.
So the information in this article
will help me with extra information that this writer got, that I might
other-wise not have gotten. The article is from the individual blog called: La
Gaceta de los Miserables or in English; The Miserable Gazette. This is called
The new Constitution and the future of Cuba by Julio Pernús.
On
July 4, we met with the president and several other leading members of The
National Assembly of People's Power, which is Cuba’s main legislative body. It
was with them that we discussed how the leaders of Cuba
met with people across the Island and took
ideas from those people and used them to put together a new constitution. After
this article I will post my own recollections of what we discussed with members
of the assembly. –SJ Otto
Both
of these articles should compliment each other.
By Julio
Pernús¹.
An interpretative
analysis of Cuba
that comes after the constitutional Yes.
It
is important that when we try to dust off the history of our new constitution,
we look at it with a broader view of 86.72% in favor and 9% against. The
data is often frivolous grimaces that do not provide enough lights to view the
immediate horizon.
The
first thing we should not overlap is that the country's new Magna Carta is
superior, quite clearly, to that of 1976; that one possessed an enveloping
Soviet nucleus and, in addition, a disguised atheistic philosophy. From my
citizen optimism I feel that we now have at our disposal a document that offers
a broader amalgam of civil rights than its predecessor and this, if fulfilled,
may be something that facilitates its tangible application.
However, from now on I affirm that
one thing is the mention of rights and another thing is its implementation. Without
believing me a lawyer, it is a bit striking to know that "there are more
than 80 occasions in which the constitution refers to the law then define this
article with a complementary rule" (1). It is not just a metaphor to
say that the Cuban legal system is in limbo and that, with our voted law of
laws, we hope to be able to fill that space so little used in the last days of
citizen constitutionality.
One of the important points when we
try to remember why it was voted Yes on February 24, is that of the
popular consultation . This
is not something entirely new for our nation, with an inevitable battle of
ideas; but in reference to the context in which this query was developed. The
left lives one of its worst hemispheric crises, with a collapsed Venezuela; in
Cuba we live the consolidation of a new national government, led by the current
president Miguel Díaz Canel. All this in the middle of a depressed economy
and with national tragedies - of great social impact -, suffered in recent
months, such as the fall of the plane rented by Cubana de Aviacion with more
than one hundred dead and the tornado that raged with rage last month from
January to Havana.
For those who like to deepen the
etymology of the concepts, we refer to a popular consultation process “when
efficient mechanisms of participation of the people are sought, in the
conscious making of important political decisions” (2). In Cuba, any such
process is relevant; above all, because of the precedent of a substantial
root of historical consciousness, sometimes linked too much, with a subjective
battle of ideas, which leads the people to a constant struggle for their social
emancipation. So it seems interesting to me to see all the complexus of
popular consultation on the project of Cuban constitution, from the glasses of
the French professor Guillaume Faburel (3), who describes our work as a process
that has sought the restoration of political confidence.
It is appropriate to
recognize that, within the constitution,
nothing is mentioned about poverty and
inequality
which denotes a danger, since it is unlikely
that subsequent affirmative action policies will be carried out to correct
these social ills.
I only hope that these approaches
can summon the decision makers of our nation to introduce the terms within
their operative agendas; because one of the best contributions that a
Magna Carta must make, is to give voice to people with little or no visibility
within the social framework of any nation. We are talking about being able
to recreate a public reality with laws that give it an important connotation of
political sense.
A matter to think for the following
general votes is that, in other countries of the world, propaganda campaigns
have an end, while the I Vote Yes was present even during the marking of the
ballot. Inside the polling stations there were banners that reaffirmed it. An
impressive element is that the 586 deputies present in the National Assembly,
when the final draft was put to the vote, said Yes;
That leaves 706,000 people outside the largest representative body of the Cuban
people in that space, with some delegate representing their No.
This should serve as a reflection
within the organism and, as a nation, we must look for formulas that favor the
inclusion of some representative of divergent thinking in the decision-making
spheres of the country. And a question arises that should not be
overlooked at all:
If those who vote Yes
are voting for Cuba,
then those who vote No, why are they voting?
What was voted on is an important
document, but the process itself did not dispute any national sovereignty, much
less our independence as a country.
In the constitution
there is no definition of nation or country, or almost nothing, then, why this
represents everything.
One of the issues of great impact
worldwide is the issue of how to improve democracy; hence, any political
process that legitimizes itself as an outbreak of participatory democracy is
given great attention. However, and this was reviewed even by our mass
media, outside of Tele Sur and some Russian channels, our referendum passed
almost silently through the big international chains. This may not say
anything to many, but, in a general sense, what I have done, I feel that I did
not have much international credibility.
Since 1998 a general vote is being
called with a very statocentric sense, giving a non-Cuban vision, for those
people who do not vote in favor of what is officially proposed. From the
sources of power it would be interesting to assess the possibility of living
these processes as something under construction, and not from a vision that
everything is already taken for granted; especially for the magnitude and
civic relevance of the document in consultation, which runs through our entire
civil society, in which, if we listen honestly, we can find divergent opinions.
The divergence does not
have to be seen as a malignant tumor
but as a sector with a different vision to
those of the government establishment.
This type of popular consultations
would generate a greater degree of trust for the people, if they worked from
the media with a greater sense of plurality. It is important to learn to
yield historical positions of absolute hegemony all this nuanced by the
integrative look of a transparent official discourse, without double
intentions. Something unfortunate is that in our Magna Carta there is no
mention of civil society, a living force within the people that usually faces,
within the first line, at key moments such as natural catastrophes.
Many were struck by the fact that,
during the consultative stage, the people did not say anything about an issue
and, suddenly, it was removed from the document. Hence the question about
the disappearance of the section on human rights; because supposedly what
we discussed was not a kind of revaluation.
So who eliminated it
and why?
The same-sex marriage seemed like a
double-sided letter and now there is talk of taking it to a referendum; however,
that same treatment is not given to other questions raised by the sovereign,
such as the electoral law.
One of the significant achievements
of the new constitution is the empowerment of the municipality, especially
because it often survives the policy of waiting for everything to come down
from above and this changes the rules of the local government for good. But
now the ethnologists of the patio will have to rethink what a municipality is,
in order to then be able to provide a solid support to the new laws of
municipality since geographical demarcations cannot be a straitjacket.
We are at the door of a new social
stage, gradually entering the technological revolution that humanity lives,
with one of the oldest populations in Latin America
and in the midst of a palpable economic depression. The policy of besieged
square does not seem to be something close to disappearing. I understand
that political plurality is not the same as multi-partyism, but from a
Christian spirituality, the existence, as a philosophical center of the
political vanguard of the nation, of an ideology that denies God becomes
exclusive. It is important that we clarify what is electoral and what is
not; Moreover, it is important to suppress the vision of ratification in
the official propaganda media, because conceptually, that only speaks of
agreeing with something that is already oriented from above.
The control of constitutionality
should be in the hands of the courts to expedite as soon as possible a set of
laws that have not just come to public light, such as religious or cults law.
In the end, only the people should
exercise their role as sovereign and their role as rector of the destinies of
the nation. The Cuba
of the next few years will be a virtual stage with a constant struggle for
citizen influence. One of the elements to follow will be the political
development of a civil society with interesting living forces, being born and
consolidating in its interior, in addition to the classic ones already known.
In conclusion, I consider that the
Magna Carta offers new opportunities for citizen empowerment. All this
mediated by obstacles typical of a country like ours, with multiple contrasts. It
is important to participate with civic awareness of all the processes that
occur within the Cuban democratic scenario.
The first challenge that is
noticed, in less than two years, is the change of the family code. I would
like to end this article with a text by Pope Francis, which initiates the
message of the Catholic bishops of Cuba regarding the new Constitution
of the Republic:
“Everyone can
contribute their own stone for the construction of the common house. Authentic
political life, founded on law and a loyal dialogue between the protagonists,
is renewed with the conviction that every woman, every man and every generation
holds within themselves a promise that can release new relational,
intellectual, cultural and cultural energies. spiritual. ”
Julio Pernús is a Member
of La Joven Cuba
and Member of the Cuban delegation to the World Youth Day Panama 2019.
