\nA joint agreement by the Council of Minister and the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba (from October 22, 1974), that instructed the Commission for the Writing of the Draft Constitution of 1976, suggested that \u201cIn terms of the topmost organs of state power the creation must be foreseen of a National Assembly of People\u2019s Delegates or simply National Assembly, as the supreme organ of State power and would study the form, integration and content of the organ elected by that National Assembly to act, through the latter\u2019s delegation, during the period between one and another of its sessions.
\nThis organ could be a Presidency, Council of State, Standing Committee or Executive Committee, whose president would be the representative of the Republic, according to international law, that is, the head of State\u2026. The Constitution must also establish the Council of Ministers, the topmost executive and administrative organ, as Government of the Nation, of which the President or Prime Minister would be the head of government.\u201d
\nJulio Fern\u00e1ndez Bult\u00e9 always affirmed that, according to the institutional design, the president of the ANPP, being the topmost organ of State, should be the country\u2019s president. The aforementioned Council of Ministers agreement, signed by Celia S\u00e1nchez Manduley, contains the nucleus of the practice followed since then until now: while the Constitution does not specify it, the president of the Councils of State and of Ministers has always been considered as the country\u2019s president.
\nHowever, the other point dealt with in the agreement is significant: it did not specify the obligation that both posts be held by the same person. Nevertheless, the final draft of the Constitution incorporated that content.
\n
![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/wmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Caravana-Fidel-en-Santa-Clara-01-de-diciembre-de-2016-6-1.jpg\")
<\/a>Councils of State and of Ministers, one same person forever?<\/h3>\n
Thus, the next Cuban president will maintain that profile: he\/she will be the country\u2019s president as well as the president of the Councils of State and of Ministers. Both functions have a great deal of content, but more than their amount, the merging involves two greater problems: the concentration of power and the confusion between politics and administration, or, in other words, between sovereignty and government.
\nA Cuban reading, badly informed about the theory and history of this matter, finds the devil of \u201cliberalism\u201d in the desire to separate the State and government, since it believes that it is equivalent to convene in the background the idea of the \u201cpartition into three of powers.\u201d
\nRoman public law, for example, did not know the idea of partition into three, but did not confuse power with its representation. The State\u2019s function is representative, while that of government is administrative.
\nIt\u2019s easy to understand for whoever wants to understand: the first stipulates, the second executes. In other words, it is about the relation between principal and agent. There are very important questions involving the construction of popular will and control of the government activity involved in such a distinction.
\nA first problem of the design of the institutional system is that the Councils of State (elected organ) and of Ministers (appointed organ) have attributions that make them decisive in the functioning of the system with respect to the ANPP. In practice, the legislative activity of both councils easily exceeds that of the ANPP. Since 1976 to 2016, the ANPP approved 123 laws while the Council of State drew up 344 decree-laws.
\nThe problems is that the organ that represents the ANPP in practice has been the decisive space for the regulatory production of maximum hierarchy, when the constitutional order regulates as such the ANPP because it is the higher organ elected by the sovereign.
\nCertainly, the ANPP has the authority to revoke the decree-laws approved by the Council of State, but that has never happened until now.<\/p>\n
Rendering of accounts<\/h3>\n
The model\u2019s other problems are the following: Part of the current Cuban debate about the figure of the head of State is concentrated in the discussion about the desirability of his\/her direct election. However, that debate frequently leaves out the system that classifies the election of the president: the type of presidential system, of parliamentary system, or of their possible combination and innovations, within which the president must operate. In the first part of this text I presented a brief outlook of the history of Cuban governance in the Constitutions of 1901 and 1940, and also a short outline of the discussion between the parliamentary and the presidential systems. After this, I\u2019ll stop now on the current governance, under which the new Cuban president […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2445,"featured_media":111077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[33669],"class_list":["post-122376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n– the State\u2019s rendering of accounts before the ANPP has not been a regular experience (the first rendering of accounts of the Council of Ministers took place in 1984, eight years after constitutional obligation was imposed with respect to this with a \u201cperiodic\u201d character).
\n– it has not expressed the power of the ANPP as the principal authority approving the state and government performances,
\n– crossed, institutional controls do not exist among the State organs (only the independence of the legal functions is recognized),
\n– there are no concrete control mechanisms capable of being activated by the citizens: the absence of an effective constitutional control system does not channel the existence of parliamentary currents, and does not establish counter majority guarantees (that prevent or hinder a majority to legislate about especially protected issues).
\nConsistently with the idea with which the system was created, Law No. 89 \u2013 \u201cOn revocation of the mandate of those elected to the organs of People\u2019s Power\u201d -, it does not establish the right to revoke the posts of president and vice presidents of the Council of State, elected by the ANPP, even when the Constitution regulates that \u201cthose elected have the duty to render accounts on their performance and can be revoked from their post at any time.\u201d
\nIt could be considered that the possibility is included of its revoking in terms of \u201cmembers of the Council of State.\u201d But, as I have said before, the institutional practice considers the president of the Councils of State and of Ministers as \u201cPresident of the Republic,\u201d and the revocation of the country\u2019s first legal powers should be a right.
\nIt is a requirement that should not be defined by judgments of value about the popular legitimacy which the person holding the post has, but rather as an institutional requisite of the post itself.
\n<\/a>Legitimacy and the new president<\/h3>\n
\nIt is probable that the general framework discussion about governance will produce stronger ideas \u2013 like the forms of social control of the government activity and about the legal and political limits established for the performance of different State organs \u2013 than an exchange centered only on the form of election of the president.
\nFour decades after its creation, it can be confirmed that the Cuban institutional model has not been followed by any country in Latin America, including those that have developed revolutionary and progressive processes since the second half of the 20th century until now.
\nOn the other hand, a Cuban citizen will be the country\u2019s president, but will not have the legitimacy that the triumphant process in 1959 conferred, and his\/her posterior development, to the two leaders that held the leadership post during this period.
\nIt is to be expected that the new legitimacy will come more from the quality of his\/her institutional performance \u2013 in relation to law, state democratization (deconcentration and decentralization), efficient government management, social inclusion in decision making, protection of rights, government control \u2013 than from the quality of the personal history of the future president.
\nNote
\n(1) In the two provinces created by the most recent political-administrative division, Artemisa and Mayabeque, since 2012 an \u201cexperiment\u201d was put into practice, with no constitutional basis, which among other questions has separated the state authorities from those of the government; that is, the leadership of the Administration Council has been separated from that of the Provincial and Municipal Assemblies of People\u2019s Power. However, a few days ago a measure in a different direction was announced: the creation of a post of vice president (appointed) of the provincial and municipal assemblies in charge of the work of the respective Administration Councils. This could give greater professionalism and stability to the government administrative work, but maintains the merging of state and government authorities in the persons of the president of the Assembly, since \u201che\/she continues being the topmost leader of the Administration Councils.\u201d
\n* The author is a Cuban professor, historian and jurist.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"