About the Family / Cuban Law Association, Rodrigo Chavez Rodriguez

Lic. Rodrigo Chávez Rodríguez

The great majority of Cuban families are not illiterate but they don’t know  that there is a Family Code. They may also be oblivious to the fact that in the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba (which definitely needs to be changed) you will find in Chapter IV, Art. 35; The State protects the family, maternity, and marriage … Until someone explains it to me, and I manage to understand it and feel convinced, I will perhaps continue to be mistaken or each time clearer in my thoughts.

Is it that when people separate, including parents leaving their kids at an early age to emigrate to other countries, almost always for economic reasons, the State protects protects maternity and the family? From what I have just said we can deduce that sustainable marriage cannot exist when, for this or other reasons, the links of a marriage, or voluntary union or whatever, are dissolved, and nor can the State protect marriage and the family, nor indeed the very low level of pregnancies among Cuban women due to  lack of many indispensable things.

In other families, aware of what has been decreed and stipulated in the Articles of the above mentioned 1975 Family Code, which can apparently assert that knowledge; this maternity, this marriage and the family are also split up, with the difference that in the case of migrants, here it is about political reasons, their rejection of the government, because they lack one of man’s most precious assets: FREEDOM, and although it brings with it separation and distance from their family, it is necessary for them to search for it and they do find it.

The state recognises in the family the fundamental component of society and attributes to it responsibilities and essential functions in the education and upbringing of the new generations, referred to in Art. 38 of the Law of Laws: Parents have the duty of feeding their children and supporting them in the defence of their legitimate interests and in the achieving of their true aspirations; as well as in contributing actively in their education in their upbringing as useful citizens, ready for life in a socialist society. Why in a “socialist society”? Why if they have to support them in their legitimate interests and just aspirations, and that may not be the interest nor aspiration of the family?

Translated by GH

13 September 2013