Category: Translator: JT

On the 25th of October, 2010, almost four months after the beginning of the release from prison of political prisoners in Cuba, the Council of the European Union (EU) considered insufficient the steps taken by Havana and decided to maintain the Common Position. In its place the European Commission was granted a mandate to negotiate and explore, inside the framework of the critical dialog, new forms that might stimulate its Cuban counterpart to continue more deeply on the path it set out upon.

The Common Position adopted in 1996 — when the member nations of the EU had bilateral relations with Cuba — was reaffirmed in 2005. In it is stated that the goal of its relations with Cuba “is to encourage a process of transition to a pluralistic democracy and towards the respect of human rights and of fundamental freedoms, as well as a sustainable recovery and the improvement of the living conditions of the Cuban people”.

Despite the opposition of the Cuban government to the aforementioned measure, the events on the Island between February and July of 2010 caused a turn that lead to a compromise to liberate all the political prisoners of the Cause of the 75*. A little before this decision, the government itself had recognized the inefficiency of the Cuban economy, classified the production of foodstuffs as a national security problem, and announced a reform baptized as an “update of the model“. The relation between these events lies in the fact that this reform requires foreign sources of financing, access to which must pass through the demands for democratization of those who have the money, among them the EU.

The failure to meet the deadline given to the Government by the Catholic Church for the liberation of those imprisoned in the spring of 2003 demonstrates that the Cuban authorities remain bound to their totalitarian vocation. In this complex context the European Commission has the mission to search out some formula that permits the completion of releases and undertaking new measures. The final decision, be what it may, will have to consider some aspects that remain crucial — from the Common Position or from bilateral relations — to contributing toward the democratization of Cuba:

– Three characteristics of the present moment.

One, the Cuban Government is the same one that debuted in 1959, such that in addition to the interests it is disposed to defend, it is responsible for all the good and all the evil that has occurred in this half century. Two, despite being almost the sole owner of the means of production and of the absence of an autonomous, juridically endorsed civil society, the government ignored the role of time in social changes; thus it lost the opportunity to undertake limited reform in a specific social sphere such as the economy, and to decide the starting point, the speed, the depth and direction of that reform, which would have permitted them to introduce partial changes without opposition from private interests. Three, as a result of the delay, along with the structural character of the crisis and citizen discontent, the changes have to be integrated.

– The absence of a true political will.

The revolutionary government, in its zeal to impose state property in absolute form, to eliminate small and medium property that offered production and services that the State never managed to supply, generated disinterest by the producers; adding to this, the fact that salaries never corresponded to the cost of living meant that the results was economic inefficiency. Nonetheless, through totalitarian control over society, reinforced by the almost total absence of an independent civil society and by the ideological solidarity with the Soviet Union, first, and with Venezuela later, the Government managed to save an exhausted, obsolete, and nonviable system for decades, despite a galloping rate of deterioration, until finally facing a profound structural crisis.

– Limited and contradictory character of the measures in the process of implementation.

Not only can the government keep in prison those who refuse to accept its terms and be exiled, by not effecting changes in current legislation the government can refill the prisons with new prisoners charged with the same offenses as those who now leave them. Adding to this the non-existence of human rights and civil liberties, the two work together to impede the resurgence of an autonomous civil society. In short, the anti-democratic and totalitarian mentality hasn’t changed. Labor reform, the consequence of a mistaken policy of “full employment” imposed against all economic logic, began to be applied after approving “majority employment” and increasing the age necessary for retirement: two means that suppose the need of labor, when it really exceeds 20% of what is used. The expansion of Self-Employment, which with few exceptions is limited to the legalization of activities that formerly occurred on the margins of the law, comes accompanied with high tax rates imposed in a country where no fiscal culture exists. Not to mention the lack of a wholesale market, bank loans, and the basic right of independent association.

Such measures cannot make up for the incapacity of the State to produce, being ignorant of the necessity of small and medium businesses, the formation of a business community, and the payment of salaries that correspond to the cost of living. But the worst of all is that these transformations are being applied to a society disarmed of rights, liberties, and civic institutions for its defense.

The interesting thing about the present scenario is that, as opposed to earlier times, the decision to change emerged from the need of the government itself, which makes it much more difficult to retreat, in a context in which the international community is paying attention to the state of civil liberties in Cuba and citizen discontent accelerates. Nonetheless, by the contradictory characteristics of the sociopolitical situation in Cuba, the change process — although zigzagging — is probably irreversible. In this sense, as much for the external agents as for the internal ones, the road to democracy will depend on critical dialog, which must build itself on a departure point, an essential concept, a governing principle, and permanent strategy.

In order for the projected changes to have a positive effect, besides completing the liberation of political prisoners, they have to ratify the Treaty of Civil and Political Rights and the Treaty of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights — in effect since 1976 in other nations and signed by the Cuban Government since February of 2008 — as well ensure that internal laws conform with these documents. Therefore, in the agenda of critical dialog with the Cuban government the urgency of its ratification cannot be absent.

Havana, 7 November 2010

* Translator’s note: The “Cause of the 75” is the release of 75 political prisoners who were arrested, tried on trumped-up charges, and imprisoned in what is known as the Black Spring of 2003.)

Translated by: JT

(Published Friday, 12 November 2010 in number 3 of the digital magazine Voices, on the site www.vocescubanas.com/voces)

The Cuban crisis continues to become more profound. The ideological ties, created interests and the totalitarian vocation rise as an obstacle to the transformations that society requires; to it are added the incomprehension of the role of time in social processes, the errant road to encourage an efficient economy and an obvious lack of political will. For all that, the changes that once were feasible to produce in a private sphere are today impossible, since the depth of the crisis and its structural character demand integral reform. The Cuban economy, whose Gordian knot has its roots in the relation of property, constitutes a proof of this necessity.

Different from animal life, human beings, gifted with cognitive capacity and structured communication with his own species, are not starting from zero, rather each generation supports itself on accumulated culture. During thousands of years, the economy — which moved forward together with the human race — was hoarding experiences and conforming with norms that regulated its function. Thanks to culture, today’s man has very little in common with his forebears, while the chimpanzee — the animal with greatest similarity with the humans — lives and does the same things he did hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Long before psychology became a science and would describe the role of interest in human activities, economic relations had demonstrated that this constitutes a powerful source of motivation, without which it is impossible to obtain advances in production in a sustained form. When a political system arbitrarily alters this reality, the stubbornness of economic law leads to results such as that of the structural crisis in which we find ourselves. Ideology is a more recent phenomenon. It arose precisely thanks to advanced development in economic relations, especially those of property. The same interacts with the economy and can serve as much as an accelerator as a brake, depending upon the understanding its subjects have of its laws and functions. It is unjustifiable that well into the 21st Century — in the midst of globalization and the information society — those who govern Cuba cling to an ideology, behave like animal species, repeating what humanity has demonstrated down the length of its existence and has accumulated and organized in databases placed at their disposition.

Private property emerged from the first forms of community life, extended itself with slavery, changed form with feudalism, returned to mutate itself with the capitalist system, and into the few spaces that totalitarian socialism has permitted its subsistence, it has demonstrated to be a highly efficient form of economic development. That which has changed with time and will keep changing is the proportion in which what is produced is distributed — that is to say, referring to social justice, what comes from redistribution but that does not depend only on the globally created product, but also on other factors such as the natural differences in people, their dispositions and aptitudes, of invested capital and technology. The product of work, therefore, cannot correspond integrally to the producer, who doubtlessly is an essential factor but not the only one who intervenes and makes redistribution possible. If private property has been employed for the exploitation of some men by others, the solution is not in abolishing it, rather in perfecting the form of redistribution of the product of work.

The violation of this principle makes the economy unnatural and converts it into a prisoner of ideology, which is the same as condemning it to death, as the dissimilar projects of socialism based on the artificial imposition of State property have evidenced. In the Soviet Union it ended in a round defeat. In China, it led to generalized hunger until they undertook the reforms that have converted it into one of the motors of the world economy. In Vietnam, the planned economy system sunk the country into misery until they started the little Vietnamese Renovation, with which a sustained growth was achieved in production and productivity until they occupied second place in the world in the exportation of rice, by which the United States stopped opposing the concession of credits, suspended the embargo and established diplomatic relations. North Korea doesn’t qualify, since it deals with a feudal-slavery socialism in its final phase. And Cuba has managed to survive thanks to a solidarity-based subsidy coming from ideological alliances.

With regards to real property or the means of production we have to add knowledge. The technological revolution and communication are transforming the industrial society into the informational society. These changes interfere with the totalitarian intent to subordinate the universal right to education and information to ideology. The University cannot be only for the revolutionaries and information cannot be edited to suit the ideological interests of the State.

The Cuban president has recognized that in nine years the cultivable area of the country has been reduced by a third; that without people who feel the need to work to survive … we will never stimulate love of work; that without the conformance of a firm and systematic social rejection of the illegal and diverse manifestations of corruption, they will continue — in no small measure — enriched at the cost of the sweat of the majority; that if we maintain inflated payrolls in almost all national undertakings, and we pay salaries unlinked with results, we can’t hope that prices will stop their constant climb, deteriorating the purchasing power of the people.

Nevertheless, the response has been limited to the promulgation of Decree Law 259 about the delivery in usufruct of land — land which the State was incapable of making productive — to the farmers capable of doing it; the labor reform that will leave more than a million unemployed; and a list — of a rather feudal nature — of approved self-employment activities that are practically limited to generating taxes “on personal income, on sales, public services, and for the utilization of the workforce, besides contributing to Social Security”, with a load of regulations and limits that impede self-employment from playing an important role in production and delivery of services.

On the other hand, nothing is said about the rights of association of those workers who face a scenario without organizations independent of the State to represent them, much less to encourage the founding of small and medium enterprises. To stimulate the growth of this sector, instead of trying to avoid the formation of a national business community, they would have to add a policy characterized by low taxes and bank credits, creation of a wholesale market, implementation of rights of association and free access to information, which implies the implementation of human rights, the basis of the dignity of the person. Only thus can the Cuban be converted into a subject interested in change.

The integral concept of property is the road to sustained and sustainable economic development and for the formation of a national business community. In Cuba, thinkers and politicians of all eras were worried about the widespread promotion of small and medium property. It is enough to cite Bishop Juan Jose Dias de Espada, Jose Antonio Saco, Francisco de Frias, Enrique Jose Varona, Julio Sanguily, and Manuel Horta Duque[1], and of course, among them Jose Marti, who considered rich a nation that has many small proprietors[2]. They and others argued the importance of encouraging a diverse economy of small agricultural producers and the formation of a national middle class.

If the end of whichever social model is the human being, then economic relations — and, inside of those, those of property — constitute a means subordinated to that end. Therefore, in any of its forms, property has a social function that consists in incentivizing economic development for human life. The dilemma is not in the choice of one or another form, rather in the capacity to consider, at a determined time, place, and conditions, which of the forms is most advantageous for development, that which makes the institution of property a fundamental of social order.

We all agree that Cuba needs an efficient economy, but that proposition becomes unviable if the producers are prohibited from being proprietors, from receiving a salary to satisfy the most elemental necessities, from having free access to the Internet and from enjoying such elemental rights as the freedom of association in the defense of their interests. We would convert property and salaries into levers of economic development, and the only guarantee of achieving it is in the implementation of human rights.

The ratification of human rights treaties signed in the year 2008 and the conformance of domestic legislation in harmony with those documents constitute unavoidable premises to get out of this present crisis. In this sense, we have to return to the vision of the 1901 Constitution, which recognized the freedoms of expression — written, spoken, or in any other form — the rights of assembly and association, and the freedom of movement to enter or leave the country. We also need to look at the Constitution of 1940 which, with the consent of the Communists taking part in the congress, added to the freedoms of 1901 the declaration that all acts of prohibition or limitation of the citizens’ participation in the political life of the nation is a crime, and the existence and legitimacy of private property in its highest concept of social function.

But it is enough that the Government, owner of nearly all the means of production, assume the political will necessary to put the citizen in first place, and proceed to untie the Gordian knot of relations with property, together with integral changes, so that the deepening of the present reforms are the rebirth of small and medium enterprises, the diversity of the forms of property, and the formation of a national middle class.

[1] Manuel Horta Duque (1896-1964), professor and jurist who laid out a plan of agrarian reform that he defended in the 1940 Congress.

[2] Marti, Jose. “Complete Works”, Vol 7, Havana, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991, p 134.

Translated by: JT

November 15 2010

Introduction

The exhaustion of the “model”, united with the interaction of a mixture of internal and external factors, has formed a box which — paraphrasing Lenin — is a result that those from below don’t want and those from above can’t follow indefinitely. In that context, the death of the political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the repressions against the Ladies In White (Damas de Blanco), the hunger strike of Guillermo Fariñas, and the mediation of the Catholic Church — among others — sharpened the Cuban crisis and put the limits of immobility into the order of the day.

Nature and society change constantly; the difference between one and the other form of change consists in that the those of nature respond to objective laws while the social changes are performed by men who, although they can accelerate or slow History, cannot stop it. The Cuban Government, based on the absurd concept that Cuba changed in 1959 — truth that converted itself into a lie through trying to convert a temporary event into an eternal one — opted to conserve an exhausted model, obsolete and unviable and managed to postpone (natural) transformations for decades. The resulting scenario of this retarding action began to yield with the transfer of power carried out in July 2006 and the election of a new Council of State in February 2008, to the point of admitting the failure of immobility, a reality that the recently announced reforms explain.

The decision of the Government to undertake reforms doesn’t mean that sufficient political will exists for the democratization of Cuba, but the democratization takes the reform path, which creates a certain common tactical platform for the change in a new state with better possibilities than the previous one.

Totalitarianism, a point of departure

The revolutionaries who assumed power in 1959, being unaware of diversity, imposed a centralized organization under the tutelage of Father State, which gradually led to the loss of consensus and was flooded by social complexity. The present situation demonstrates that when temporary changes fix themselves into a concrete social organization and this form is declared definitive, one is on the path to totalitarianism; from the loss of public spaces and the conversion of the State into the only concern.

About totalitarianism, José Martí, in “Future Slavery”, said more or less the following: if the poor are accustomed to losing everything to the State, they will stop working for their subsistence and like public necessities, they would come to be satisfied by the State. Thus, the functionaries would acquire an enormous influence and the poor would go from being slaves of the capitalists to being slaves of the functionaries. And he pronounced: A slave is anyone who works for another who has dominion over him; and in this socialist system the community would dominate the man, who would turn over all his labor to the community.[1]

For Ortega y Gasset, the biggest dangers that today threaten civilization are “the ‘Statification’ of life, the intervention of the State, the absorption of all social spontaneity by the State; that is to say the cancellation of historical spontaneity, which in the end sustains, nurtures and drives human destiny”[2] … That which is summarized in the thesis of Benito Mussolini, ‘Everything for the State, nothing outside the State’.”[3]

Fortunately, even under the iron control established by the State, as Hanna Arendt would express it, the faculty of citizens to act politically would not disappear completely. And she added: “A revolution that proposes to free men without raising, in parallel, the need to create a public space to permit the exercise of that liberty can only lead to the liberation of individuals from one dependence to lead them to another, perhaps more of an iron fist than the previous”.[4]

Entering into the new stage, the challenge consists in converting the Cuban into an active subject who effectively participates in all aspects of his interest, including national definitions. In this sense, the question becomes: “Why did previous changes lead to the deep structural crisis in which we are immersed?” From my point of view, the principal cause has its roots in first, the weakness, and later the disappearance, of civil society, understood as an interrelated system of associations, public spaces, rights, and liberties, that constitute the base for an interchange of opinions, of shared agreement on conduct and decision-making, without the added authorization than emanates from law. The former leads us to the process that swept Cuban civil society, whose seeds reach back to the claims of the Havana Creole oligarchy of the first half of the 18th Century, approaching the place its class occupied in colonial society, although the legal existence of civil society was embodied by the Pact of Zanjón in 1878.

That civil society carried out an estimable work in our history and existed until its liquidation by the revolutionary power which, in 1959, together with the first means of the people’s democratic character, started a process of concentration of property of the hands of the State and power in the hands of an elite headed by the Chief of the Revolution, who swept out existing associations and substituted, for them, others created initially, for, and at the service of the Revolutionary State until — with the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968 — the last vestiges of Cuban economic independence were ultimately liquidated.

This process of dismantling took place against the backdrop of the Cold War between the great powers of the time within which the disagreements with the U.S. led first to the deterioration of relations between the two governments, and later to confrontation. The effect was logical, since conflicts between states tend to weaken the conflict between them and their citizens. In addition, if one state tries to assume a leading role in the other, the legitimacy of the promoters of internal change are affected; this worsens when the country trying to assume this role has a bulging file of intentions on the other — as is the case with the United States with respect to Cuba — which offers enemies of change a priceless historical argument in their defense.

For this reason, among others, the commercial embargo imposed by the United States, instead of contributing to the strengthening of our spaces, made them more scarce; instead of protecting us from the arbitrariness of the State, collaborated with it; instead of promoting climates of trust for the advancement of human rights, made them step back. The dispute with the United States became a factor that worked against whatever institution, personality or country tried to come to binding agreements with Cuba that would have implied the restoration of the civil society. Thus it happened in 2003 with the possible entry of Cuba into the Coutonou Agreement; in 2009 with the rejection of the accord which would have conditioned the re-entry of Cuba into the OAS agreement that conditioned the reinstatement of Cuba on the acceptance of the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter, which demands respect for human rights and fundamental liberties; and most recently, in 2008, with the signing of the two UN covenants of human rights which haven’t yet been ratified. External conflict served as an argument for Government to justify the absence of civic rights and liberties of its citizens. So important is this fact that Cuba — a Western country which had made progress on civil and political rights to the point of creating and enforcing the Constitution of 1940, which served as a basis for all subsequent civic and political struggles, including that of revolutionaries who seized power in 1959 — after seventy years (still) lacks such a vital institution.

The update of the model and democratization

As the update of the model requires external sources of finance, access to the same happens by claims of democratization of by the holders of these sources, which explains — in part — the present process of prisoner release. The challenge in this direction consists in converting the liberation of the political prisoners of the 2003 Black Spring into, first, a moment which should be complemented with the liberation of the rest of the political prisoners, and with other measures aimed at the rescue of fundamental liberties of the citizens. It is a question of a difficult, but not impossible, process. The new stage differentiates itself from earlier times in which change arose not only as a claim of the opposition or from some external power; but rather also from the need for self-government to conserve power, which made retrogression much more difficult — as happened with other opportunities. Now the proposition to update the model is growing, but in an unfavorable international context, at a time when the international community is showing growing attention to the state of civil liberties in Cuba, which will contribute to making the road towards democracy difficult.

Among the first announced measures are labor reform which will leave more than one million workers unemployed and the widening of the variations of self-employment, including the contracting for cheap labor in some of its activities. Nonetheless, said measures demonstrate that the State has not renounced the totalitarian vice of deciding everything.

The exclusion of sectors or social groups in decisions has been a constant of our history. Since the claims hoisted by Felix de Arrate in the mid-18th Century, until the revolutionary process which assumed power in 1959 — with the exception of Father Felix Varela and afterward Jose Marti, who conceived the modern republic with and for the good of all — different movements and figures staged various events toward the end of improving the relative conditions of Creoles vis-a-vis Spaniards, improving the condition of the Spanish province, increasing its autonomy, and achieving independence; but always from and for the social class they represented, to the detriment of other classes or sectors of the Island. The difference lies in that the totalitarian model, far from resolving this injustice, ended up reproducing its evil in its most developed form: the exclusion of all society by the State.

Labor reform is a consequence of the errant policy of “full employment”, which imposed itself against all economic logic to artificially exhibit before the world the superiority of the Cuban system, while the extension of self-employment responds to the intent to diminish the impact of current massive layoffs and the disaster of absolute state ownership. Both measures, before and now, were implemented by the State with no citizen participation and both are pregnant with insufficiencies and limitations.

The official press has published a list with 178 self-employment activities, within only 83 of which can the self-employed person contract for the labor of others; 29 already existing were not granted authorization; another 9 will remain limited and only 7 appear to be new, which demonstrates the announced enlargement is reduced to giving legal form to what already existed. For a person who opts for self-employment, the wholesale market needed to support this activity will not be able to create itself within the next few years, and the bank loans that would be required to put such activities in motion are still in the “analysis phase”; thus, they are starting, once again, without having prepared the minimum conditions for success, and ignoring the negative experience of Decree Law 259 of July 2008, which was condemned to disaster at birth. This Decree parcelled out idle land in usufruct — that is a “loan” of public lands to individuals for a set time period, but not a granting of title — without any consideration for bank loans or wholesale suppliers of necessary equipment and supplies, which guaranteed that more than half of the land parcelled out remains unused. In the case of self-employment, that which remains well-defined is that taxes will have to be paid “on personal income, on sales, public services, and for the use of a labor force, besides contributing to Social Security”. Nevertheless, nothing is said about the right of association of these workers, who enter into a scenario without organizations independent of the State to represent them, and much less is said about encouraging small and medium-sized businesses.

What permits the State to keep deciding the destiny of the nation all by itself? In the first place, that fact that it is almost the sole owner of all the means of production, which permits them to introduce reforms without opposition from other ownership interests and without depending on external forces; in the second place, as I expressed in ‘Towards a new February 24th‘[5], social changes are generally produced under the direction of new forces that assume power, while in Cuba, the initial subject is the same force that has retained power for more than a half-century, which makes it easier for them — in the absence of an independent civil society — to determine the starting point, the speed, the depth and direction of changes; in the third place, since logical alternation — that is periodic changes in who controls the government — have not existed with respect to power, the force that has governed during the last half-century is responsible for all the good and all the evil which has occurred; in the fourth place, because this force has contracted certain personal or group interests that influence its conduct.

The foregoing explains why errors were committed in the Revolutionary Offensive of March 1968 aren’t recognized, which eliminated in a single blow tens of thousands of small proprietors, many of whom employed contracted manual labor and offered services and products that the State could never manage to supply. By eliminating small proprietorship, besides the appearance of inefficiency, the State enterprises became estaticular — a term which can be defined as “the property of the State for the profit of the individual,” or, in simpler language, “corrupt”[6] — provoking the surge of a network of products and services on the margins of the law, those which, not being able to count on provisions of raw material, tools or replacement parts, led to widespread thievery, baptized with the verbs ‘escape’, ‘fight’, and ‘resolve’, which designate actions whose goal is survival. That measure was a product of the desire to control everything and prevent the formation of a middle class, ignoring that in Cuba — from the Bishop Juan José Díaz de Espada at the beginning of the 19th Century until Julio Sanuily in the 20th Century, through José Antonio Savo, Francisco de Frías, Enrique José Varona, and José Martí — countless thinkers argued the necessity of encouraging a diversified economy of small agricultural producers as well as, simultaneously, a national middle class.

From all the foregoing one deduces the need of a social structure which guarantees the participation of all citizens with legal rights and a concept of ownership in which its various forms might coexist and live together, then property — be it individual, family, cooperative, private or of the State — should have the social function of mobilizing the potential and initiative of people to produce; therefore, each of its forms has every right to exist and coexist as long as it accomplishes that function.

Human Rights: Guarantee of Success

The guarantee that the changes projected by the Government might have a positive effect has its roots in the implementation of human rights, based on dignity of the person. Nevertheless, owing to the absence of an independent and legally authorized civil society, the advance from the release of the prisoners to the re-establishment of civil society will have to depend — to a certain degree — on the support of the international community, which must include in the agenda of its dialog with the Cuban government the ratification of all human rights treaties signed since 2008, along with making domestic law consistent with these documents. Our political history precisely constitutes an in vivo demonstration that changes, in the absence of citizen civic participation, take us directly back to the starting point, which explains that in matters of civil liberties we may have returned to the state in which Cuba found itself in the second half of the 19th Century. That story tells us that economic changes are as unavoidable as in the subject of human rights.

Towards this end Cuba has a long and rich history in the subject of rights, from the Plan of Self-Government For Cuba[7] — prepared in 1811 by Father José Agustín Caballero — to the Constitution of 1940. The Constitutional Plan For the Cuban Island — prepared in 1812 by Joaquín Infante, the lawyer from Bayamón — already distinguished the division between the Legislative, Executive, Judicial, and Military powers, as well as the observance of the social rights and duties directed at equality, liberty, property, and safety. The Instructional Plan for the Economic and Political Self-Government of the Overseas Provinces — prepared by the presbyter Félix Varela in 1823 — considered that putting political liberties and rights into effect exclusively for Creole whites constitute prejudice[8]. The Constitution of Guaimaro, of 1869, endorsed the classic division of powers and sanctioned that no legislative Chamber could attack the freedoms of religion, press, peaceful assembly, teaching and petition, nor any inalienable right of the people. The Constitution of La Yaya, in 1897, included for the first time a dogmatic section — dedicated to individual rights and political rights — where it reads that all inhabitants of the country remain protected in their religious opinions and in the exercise of their respective religious worship, and have a right to proclaim their ideas with freedom and meet and associate among themselves for the legal goals of life.

In the Republic, the 1901 Constitution recognized the freedoms of expression — written or oral, by means of the press or other process — and also the rights of assembly and association “for all legal goals”, the freedom of movement to enter or leave the country. The 1940 Constitution maintained those rights recognized in 1901, and added others, such as: the right to demonstrate and form political organizations contrary to those of the regime, the autonomy of the University of Havana, the declaration as a crime all acts of prohibition or limitation against the citizenry’s right to participate in the political life of the nation, as well as the recognition of the legitimacy of resistance for the protection of individual rights, and with respect to property, directly recognized the legitimate existence of private property in its highest concept of social function.

The 1976 Constitution, the first since the 1959 revolution, recognizes the freedom of speech, of press, of assembly, of association and of demonstration. The difference with its predecessors stems from that fact that all these rights are subordinate to Article Five, which recognizes the Communist Party as the superior directing force — as much for society as for the State — to build socialism and advance towards communism. In 2002 this Constitution suffered a new modification, in the year the majority of Cubans “approved” its “irrevocable” character such that the current system — obsolete and unviable — could not be reformed, and also prohibiting the necessary adaptation of the fundamental Law in response to changes that occur in every society. With this last reform, the government succeeded in converting the Constitution into a social braking mechanism, and in the era of globalization and information this meant anchoring the country in the past.

The challenge consists in being able to convert present governmental reforms into a step towards democracy, that which puts in first place the implementation of human rights and fundamental liberties, and guarantees the participation of all Cubans in the destiny of the nation. And above all that the subordination of the individual to the State disappear from our scene, a proposition that the daily newspaper Granma just rejected again, on Friday, September 24, noting that self-employment “is one more alternative, under the watchful eye of the State”, which is to say under the watch of the same institution responsible for the stagnation in which we find ourselves.

1. MARTÍ, JOSÉ. Complete Works, Volume 15, pp 388-392.
2. José Ortega y Gasset. The Rebellion of the Masses. El País. Classics of the Twentieth Century. Madrid. 2002, p 164.
3. José Ortega y Gasset. The Rebellion of the Masses. El País. Classics of the Twentieth Century. Madrid. 2002, p 166.
4. Schmitt, Carl and Arendt, Hannah. Consensus and Conflict; the definition of politics. Colombia, Editorial de la Universidad de Antioquia, 2002, p. 147
5. Toward a New February 24th, published in the digital daily Encuentro en la Red, February 22, 2008.
6. Estaticular (property of the State and profit of the individual), Today’s Cuban Morals, published in the digital daily Encuentro en la Red, in March 2001.
7. H. PICHARDO. Documents for the History of Cuba, Volume I, p 210.
8. J. IBARRA CUESTA. Varela the Precursor, a Study of the Era. Havana, Editorial de Ciencias, p 72, Sociales, 2004.

Translated by: JT

(Originally published Tuesday, September 28th on the website www.cubanalisis.com)

Published on Dimas’s Blog on October 15, 2010