Wed, May 30, 2018 page7

• Cuba to rework outdated constitution

  CONTRADICTIONS: Certain constitutional elements such as a restrictive definition of marriage and a ban on hiring workers run counter to accepted practice in modern Cuba

  • AP, HAVANA
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  When Cuba adopted its constitution, the sugar-based economy was being bolstered by aid from the Soviet Union, citizens were forbidden to run private businesses or sell homes and gay people kept their sexual identity a tightly guarded secret.

  Now a rewrite is on the way, as the nation’s communist leaders try to adapt to the post-Soviet world in which hundreds of thousands of Cubans work for themselves, US remittances and tourism keep the economy afloat and the daughter of Communist Party First Secretary Raul Castro is campaigning for gay rights.

  The legislature is scheduled to on Saturday name the commission to draft a new constitution, consulting with the citizenry and eventually bringing it to a referendum.

  Officials have made clear that the constitution would maintain a Communist Party-led system in which freedom of speech, the press and other rights are limited by “the purposes of socialist society.”

  However, Castro and other leaders apparently hope to end the contradictions between the new, more open economy and a legal system that calls for tight state control over all aspects of the economy and society.

  The ban on dual citizenship collides with the government’s efforts to reach out to exiles. The definition of marriage as between a man and a woman runs up against Cuba’s growing gay rights movement. Many small businesses employ workers, even though the constitution forbids “obtaining income that comes from exploiting the work of others.”

  The constitution allows worker cooperatives, but only in the farm sector, and officials have allowed other types of cooperatives, but placed sharp limits on their growth and operations, keeping them as marginal economic players.

  The government is also likely to see changes. Castro, who last month turned over the presidency to Miguel Diaz-Canel, has proposed limiting presidents to two five-year terms and imposing an age limit — a dramatic shift following a nearly 60-year run of leadership by Castro and his late brother, Fidel, who both ruled into their 80s.

  “Cuba needs to change its constitution, because our society has been radically transformed in recent years,” said political scientist Lenier Gonzalez, one of the directors of Cuba Possible, a think tank aimed at promoting reform with the limits laid out by Cuban law and its single-party system.

  Society has become more international, forms of property ownership have diversified and new social movements have emerged that exist on the margins of the law, he said.

  The revamp could also help build the legitimacy of Diaz-Canel, 58, and other members of the new guard who are finally replacing the men enshrined as national heroes of the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, he added.

  The new constitution could boost the role of the parliament, which usually meets for two days a year to listen to speeches and approve official proposals, the party newspaper Granma reported, adding that the congress might be professionalized and its membership trimmed.

  The 605 deputies now receive no pay other than what they get from their other jobs.

  Lawmaker Mariela Castro, Raul’s daughter and director of the Center of Sexual Education, said the reform would expand gay rights, partly by tackling the wording of the constitution that limits marriage to a man and woman.

  The constitution was adopted four decades ago at a time when Cuba was a potential Cold War flash point and a pillar of the Soviet Bloc. The document proclaims Cuba’s adherence to Marxist-Leninist socialism and to solidarity with countries of the Third World, particularly Latin America.

  The party is described as the “superior guiding force” of Cuba’s society and it says the economic system is “based on socialist property of the entire people over the fundamental means of production and on the suppression of the exploitation of man by man.”

  “It is a historic constitution, the only one that remains in our hemisphere” from the time of Soviet-style socialism, University of Havana law professor Julio Antonio Fernandez Estrada said. “It’s more than 40 years old... It continues speaking of things that now do not exist in the world, such as the formation of the citizen for communism.”

  The economic reforms promoted by Raul Castro, which sought to allow the limited introduction of private enterprise within the communist system, “have been carried out, if not against, then in large part in spite of the constitution,” he said.
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