{"id":258559,"date":"2022-10-04T18:12:36","date_gmt":"2022-10-04T22:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=258559"},"modified":"2022-10-04T18:12:36","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T22:12:36","slug":"who-said-everything-is-lost-the-referendum-and-its-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/in-plain-words\/who-said-everything-is-lost-the-referendum-and-its-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWho said everything is lost?\u201d The referendum and its legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A law approving same-sex marriage, including adoption rights for same-sex couples and access to assisted reproduction, has been <\/span>passed<\/b><\/a>\u00a0in a country that has a reputation for being exceptional. Achieving it was not easy. For more than a year, the churches and the most conservative sectors strongly opposed it and managed to resist a first attempt at legal formulation. The political solution was not to dictate it as a decree of the Council of State or approve it by the National Assembly, but to submit it to a referendum. Thus, it was approved by a majority, on September 26, 2021. Naturally, I am talking about Switzerland.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Cuba of the early 1960s stood out for its great leap forward in terms of human rights. Before the integration of the political parties into one, the profound reform of the institutional system of the State, the declaration of socialism, a transformation of social relations and inherited cultural patterns were unleashed, starting with family life itself. This was expressed in the early independence of the boys and girls who left home to teach literacy in the mountains, to study in Havana, who formed part of the militias or went to cut cane in the savannahs of Camag\u00fcey, given over to unparalleled civic socialization.<\/span><\/p>\n

In those years when new things happened every day, it also began to spread that those were spaces of perversion, where minors lived promiscuous and precocious sexuality. Those children were taken to Siberia, to brainwash, them with communism, and to turn them into robots at the service of the regime. In a typical contagion reaction, 15,000 children were sent alone to the United States, among them some of my cousins, under the \u201cvery reliable\u201d tutelage of some churches, the same ones that advised against going to teach literacy, because it was equivalent to plunging into indoctrination and damnation. The history of Operation Peter Pan<\/strong><\/a> and its organizers, based on declassified files and testimonies of the protagonists, is available in books and documentary films for those who want to have an informed opinion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, most of those mobilizations and the social change that accompanied them were not encrypted in laws or codes. Civic socialization and the construction of a new political culture did not depend on regulations and rules but on social participation. In fact, once the great social reforms of the Revolution in 1959-61 were applied, that mixture of classes and skin colors, equalization of gender roles, mass access to education, health, employment, welfare, depended more on ascending social mobility generated by access policies, which made use of legislation as their instrument, rather than initiatives of the legal system.<\/span><\/p>\n

The background swell of this decade of the 1960s, which is also idealized, left bitter experiences, reflections also of the political culture of the time, in particular ideological restriction and extremism, homophobia and discrimination of religious people. The purges of homosexuals, believers and those disaffected to the Revolution that occurred in those early years, prior to the Gray Quinquennium and the influence of the Soviet Union, derived from the pure and simple political conflict, as well as from prejudices implanted in the previous civic culture, but also of others that were part of the revolutionary harvest itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anticlericalism, rooted as a political culture in the atheist leftism bequeathed to us by Spain, before Moscow, and present in the Cuban tradition of various colors, was exacerbated by the belligerent position of the churches, actively aligned against communism from very early years. The UMAP (1965-67), a mixture of military service and \u201cschools of conduct\u201d where religious people, homosexuals, disaffected people, and even young people sanctioned for various offenses were sent to \u201cre-educate\u201d themselves, was an emblematic fruit of that bitter harvest, although not the only one or the last.<\/span><\/p>\n

If those who led the Communist Party in the 1960s, five decades later, learned those lessons, and rectified their atheistic and homophobic radicalism, it could be assumed that the churches would also have learned the lesson of their anti-communism, which divided the mass of believers. Disseminating anti-Family Code propaganda from the pulpit and disseminating it through the numerous printed and digital media available to those churches throughout the island, has not been a good example of preaching about love, coexistence and national reconciliation.<\/span><\/p>\n

In any case, the government has had to thoroughly support family rights that concern gender equality, LGTBI, single-parent groups, the elderly, minors, affected by abuse and violence, and everything covered by this vast law of families. But it has also had to preserve relations with those churches, almost all of them conservative, as well as their right to free expression and discrepancy, along with that of citizens who defend similar values. In other words, they can\u2019t be told \u201cif you don\u2019t like socialism, let them leave.\u201d Politics has to be done, in the deep sense of the word, and it has to be done well.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fulfilling the role of governing consists not only in issuing \u201clegal\u201d laws, but also in adopting legitimate policies, endorsed by citizen consensus. In addition to implementing consultation and promoting informed debate, it is necessary to ensure acceptable conditions for democratic functioning. The last reason for this functioning is constituted by the means of direct democracy (MDD), identified as the plebiscite, the referendum, the consultation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The reason (or not) for the consultation and the referendum<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

I imagine that readers are not so interested in the details of the academic and doctrinal debate about the use of these MDDs, and in any case, this is not the space. I will only point out two aspects that seem to me to be of greatest interest, and which, of course, are relevant beyond our borders.<\/span><\/p>\n

One: there is no unanimity regarding its use among jurists, political scientists, and other experts. Some affirm that if the representative bodies fulfill their role democratically, why consult and vote? Still others argue that these mechanisms facilitate \u201cthe tyranny of the majority.\u201d They say that when they arise from a citizen initiative \u201cfrom below,\u201d they almost never go beyond \u201cnon-binding\u201d consultations. And that when they arise \u201cfrom above,\u201d they lend themselves to government manipulation, sometimes by asking for the Yes or No.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two: despite the above, the fact is that referendums, plebiscites and citizen consultations constitute a growing trend in many regions and countries, since the end of World War II, so that they have become common, both in \u201cfull democracies\u201d as in \u201cauthoritarian regimes.\u201d These experiences show opposite results to those mentioned in the previous paragraph. For example, the \u201cnon-binding\u201d consultations have served to reveal fissures in consensus that gave rise to content changes in legislative proposals, as occurred with the draft of the Constitution and the Family Code itself in Cuba. Examples that the government does not win every time it calls and organizes a referendum were the No to the authoritarian regime of Pinochet (1988), and the other No, almost 34 years later, to the new Constitution of Chile proposed by a democratically elected government, both rejected at the polls by the majority of Chileans.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, and as experience reveals, \u201cthe political ecosystem,\u201d as it is said now, does not work like clockwork anywhere, nor in a fully democratic manner, in terms of expressing the interests and wishes of minorities as well. In any case, if it is about fidelity to the consensus, are the National Assembly and the State institutions in charge of legislating more legitimate than the direct and secret vote of all citizens?<\/span><\/p>\n

Based on the premise of a happy world, that is to say, entirely just, rights should not be debated publicly, much less be put to a referendum. Perhaps they should not even be voted for as part of a new Constitution, even if the previous one had not recognized them. It would be enough for \u201cthe United Nations\u201d or the \u201cinnate sense of justice\u201d to dictate them to us as self-evident.<\/span><\/p>\n

Family Code: the referendum and the country we will be<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n