Raúl Castro himself admitted that the regime is in no hurry to “eliminate the excess of secrecy”
14ymedio, Havana, 19 July 2024 — A request from Raúl Castro 15 years ago – “to eliminate excessive secrecy” – was cited as a leitmotiv when drafting the Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information, approved this Thursday in Parliament. The document supports, at least in theory and for the first time in the country’s legal history, the right of Cubans to obtain official information in a “truthful, objective and timely” manner.
This right is part of the Constitution – it is prescribed in articles 53, 97 and 101 – but until now it has been ignored by the State. The complaint about the lack of information has even reached the official press, which has lamented that the authorities are secretive when it comes to offering data and figures to support the news.
The emblematic case last year was the number of femicides. At least two official newspapers – Girón and Escambray – described the difficulties in addressing the issue when no authority provides the total number of women victims of gender-based violence.
The also official newspaper Invasor, for its part, was much more direct in describing the State’s “inventory of silences” and invoked – for not being able to offer truthful information – the Communication Law, approved in 2023, “given that ministries, business groups and agency directorates had parceled out at their convenience who, how, when and what to say.”
This right is part of the Constitution – it is prescribed in articles 53, 97 and 101 – but until now it has been ignored by the State.
Supposedly the law – explained this Thursday by the Minister of Science, Technology and Environment, Eduardo Martínez Díaz – is supposed to oblige “the organs of the State and others responsible for providing public information” to respond to those who request information. The text, Martínez Díaz said, is based on a “comparative” reading of 123 other international laws and 11 decrees approved in Cuba, which touch on the subject.
In the presentation, the minister quoted Castro several times to remind that, despite the existence of the law, “a State will always have to maintain a logical secrecy in some matters, that is something that no one disputes,” although, he considered, “it is necessary to put on the table all the information and arguments that support each decision.”
The regulations, according to Martínez Díaz, to which Miguel Díaz-Canel paid special attention, are aimed at the “system of public registry, document and archive management, the government information system, the computerization of society, the protection of personal data and the social communication of the Cuban State and Government.”
According to the minister, “making state management transparent” means using more technology in the Public Administration and ensuring that people have “wide availability of public information about its actions, by all possible means, without having to request it.” He believes that there are “subjects obliged” to respond to this particular law, including “higher State bodies, Central State Administration bodies, their subordinate and attached entities; provincial and municipal entities and other national entities and companies that provide public services.”
The law will supposedly force “State bodies and other subjects responsible for providing public information” to respond to those who request information.
The law, as the minister warned, provides for the limitation of information for “exceptional reasons”: if it is classified data, if its disclosure is considered “dangerous to, affects or violates sovereignty, defense and national security,” if it violates intellectual property rights or damages the environment. “Applicants are responsible for the use of the information they access,” the text explains. “Doing so improperly may generate administrative, civil or criminal liability, in accordance with current legislation.”
The law will come into force 180 working days after its publication in the Official Gazette and it remains to be seen to what extent the “obligated subjects” will respect it. Until now, the policy has been “I keep quiet, then I inform,” as Escambray summed up a year ago. “Every obstacle in access to information is one more step towards censorship,” said the official newspaper at the time, denouncing the wall of ice that the leaders had “directed” to be erected between reality and the press.
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