Concepts: Criminal Code / Cuban Law Association – Wilfredo Valln Almeida

Wilfredo Vallín Almeida

As our readers know, educating the national population on legal issues is one of the projects of the Cuban Law Association.

Given the importance of the issue, and the need for it, we intend to keep working in this direction from this space, to assist with this preparation so needed by everyone.

So, we will begin with Question-and-Answer: What is a Criminal Code?

Normally a Criminal Code is a compilation of those human behaviors considered detrimental to social harmony and which are, therefore, punishable due to their damage to the established order and peaceful and organized relations that must exist in any human community.

When a human act (or inaction) or actor is damaging in relation to other people in society it is defined as harmful by the State, and so it is considered and defined as a “crime” and comes to occupy a place in the conduct we refer to in the previous paragraph.

Each and every one of these human behaviors, now conceived as crimes, are enunciated, condemned and reflected in writing in the articles of the Criminal Code in question, so that individual behavior can be collated with a description in a prohibitive Article, and coinciding with that it is the understood that such conduct is a crime.

If the behavior of subject X does not coincide very closely with the provisions of the collated Article, no crime would exist…

So, in summary, the criminal code is nothing more than a compilation of those behaviors prohibited by the State (although it also includes other aspects relating to the adjudication and imparting of criminal justice).

The non-observance of its provisions will entail punishment in the form of penalties imposed by the established state apparatus (the judicial system).

The Cuban Penal Code, begins its presentation with some Preliminary Provisions which are the objectives of the code in force in our country, which I will discuss in detail in future work.

July 22 2012