Cuba to update Soviet-era constitution, adapting to reforms
Country’s parliament scheduled to name commission Saturday
HAVANA— When Cuba adopted its current 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 gays kept their sexual identity a tightly guarded secret.
Now a rewrite is on the way as the country’s communist leaders try to adapt to the post-Soviet world in which hundreds of thousands of Cubans work for themselves, American remittances and tourism keep the economy afloat and the daughter of Communist Party chief Raul Castro is campaigning for gay rights.
The country’s parliament is scheduled to name the commssion on Saturday to draft a new constitution, consulting with the citizenry and eventually bringing it to a referendum.
Officials have made clear that the constitution will maintain a Communist Party-led system in which freedom of speech, the press and other rights are limited by “the purposes of socialist society.”
But 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 government, too, is likely to see changes.
“Cuba needs to change its constitution because our society has been radically transformed in recent years,” said political scientist Lenier Gonzalez.
The current constitution was adopted four decades ago at a time when Cuba was a potential Cold War flashpoint 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.
“It is a historic constitution, the only one that remains in our hemisphere” from the time of Soviet-style socialism, said Julio Antonio Fernandez Estrada, a law professor at the University of Havana.
“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.”