HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban lawmakers on Saturday unanimously approved a revised draft of a new constitution that retains the island’s one-party socialist system but reflects its socio-economic opening since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Cuba's former President Raul Castro (C-L) talks to his grandson and bodyguard Raul Rodriguez Castro during a session of the National Assembly in Havana, Cuba, December 21, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer

The draft new constitution, which has 229 articles and will replace a Cold War era one, will maintain the Communist Party as the country’s guiding force and the state’s dominance of the economy, according to state-run media. A copy has not yet been distributed to the public.

The document, however also, legitimizes private business that has blossomed over the last decade, acknowledges the importance of foreign investment and opens the door to gay marriage, according to state-run media.

It imposes age and term limits on the presidency, after late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and his younger brother Raul Castro ruled the country for nearly six decades, and introduces the role of a prime minister.

The current draft incorporates into an original one published in July hundreds of mainly small changes proposed by citizens during a three-month public consultation at community meetings nationwide. It will go to a referendum next Feb. 24.

“This process is a genuine and exceptional demonstration of the practice of power by the people and therefore of the markedly participative and democratic nature of our political system,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel told the national assembly in a speech closing its week-long, twice-yearly session.

The 58-year-old took office from his mentor Raul Castro in April although the latter remains head of the Communist Party until 2021.

Critics say the fundamentals of Cuba’s system were never up for discussion and the government only included suggestions it wanted to.

Some, including opposition groups that typically do not mobilize many people, are already campaigning against the constitution online using the hashtag #yovotono (“I vote no”).

One of the articles revised regards the accumulation of property. Whereas the first draft originally banned this, the revised constitution simply stipulates that the state must regulate it, according to state-run media.

However the latest draft also reinserts the aim of “advancing toward communism” that was taken out of the first draft.

One controversial revision is the elimination of an article that recognized matrimony as the union of two persons as opposed to the union between a man and a woman as in the 1976 constitution.

That article was the one that sparked the most controversy in a society that has made great strides in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in recent years but remains conservative on the topic.

The new draft removes the definition of marriage altogether thus still opening the door to same-sex union albeit not giving it the same symbolic level of backing.

The government has said instead it will update the family code and put it to a referendum in the next two years.

“There is no setback,” wrote Mariela Castro, the daughter of Raul Castro, who has championed LGBT rights in Cuba in recent years, on Facebook.

“The fight continues, let’s give a ‘yes’ to the constitution and then close ranks to achieve a family code as advanced as the new constitutional text.”

She asked for permission to briefly interrupt the assembly meet on Saturday to hug her father in an unusual public display of affection within the Castro family, thanking him for his example “as a parent and as a revolutionary”, sparking applause.

Still, the decision to put the family code to a referendum has angered Cuban intellectuals who say fundamental human rights should not be put up for vote. Other laws have not been put to a referendum.

“Equal rights to marriage in Cuba should be a presidential decree, not a referendum that exonerates the state from responsibility and opens the door to conservative homophobia,” said Harold Cardenas, a professor of Marxism and blogger.</s>HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba has reinserted the goal of “advancing toward a communist society” into the draft of the country’s new constitution after its removal from the first version had sparked concern among thousands of citizens, state-run television said on Thursday.

The national assembly is this week debating a revised draft of the constitution, designed to replace a Soviet-era one to better reflect the times, for example acknowledging private property and opening the door to same-sex marriage.

Cuba is one of a handful of countries worldwide still run by the Communist Party and has insisted its one-party socialist system is irrevocable.

Still, the commission writing the new constitution, headed by party chief Raul Castro, took the mention of “communism” out of the first draft that it published in July and put to a nationwide, three-month popular consultation.

Thousands of citizens at community-level meetings then called for it to be re-inserted, according to Cuba’s state broadcaster, and as a result it was re-inserted into the draft now under debate by the national assembly.

“The true revolutionary is the one who always looks to overcome the limits of the possible and that is why we must maintain this aspiration (to communism),” lawmaker Yusuam Palacios told the assembly on Thursday.

The inclusion of “communism” is one of 760 changes to the first draft made on the back of the popular consultation.

The government has insisted the drafting of the constitution is participatory democracy at its best, while critics point out that the fundamentals of the Cuban system were never up for discussion and say its methodology is questionable.

If this latest draft passes, as expected, a national assembly vote this week, it will go to a nationwide referendum on Feb. 24.</s>Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel, left, applauds as former President Raul Castro, center, greets members of the Assembly before the start of a session to debate the draft of a new Constitution, at the Convention Palace in Havana, Cuba, Friday, Dec. 21, 2018. The draft will be submitted to a popular referendum on Feb. 24, 2019. Cuba's government said Tuesday that language promoting the legalization of gay marriage will be removed from the draft after widespread popular rejection of the idea. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) (AP)</s>HAVANA — Cuba’s National Assembly on Saturday approved an update of the country’s constitution, the final step before a national referendum expected to approve the new charter in February.

The new constitution contains more continuity than change, although it recognizes the de-facto modernization of Cuban society over the last decade. The constitution maintains Cuba as a centrally planned economy ruled by a single Communist Party, but recognizes private property for the first time and paves the way for a separate referendum on legalizing gay marriage.

It also creates the role of prime minister alongside the current president, as well as provincial governors.

Legalizing private property is a formal recognition of significant change in Cuban society over the past decade. Former President Raul Castro permitted home and auto sales, creating a booming real-estate market, and more than half a million Cubans have permits to work as entrepreneurs. Hundreds of thousands more work full or part-time in the private sector without licenses.

The new constitution also recognizes worker-owned co-operatives for the first time as a legal form of production in every sector of the economy, while maintaining Cuba’s largely inefficient and stagnant state-run industries as the central means of production.

The degree to which the new constitution will actually spur change is expected to be seen only after the National Assembly approves a raft of changes to the civil and penal codes and electoral laws next year.

Language seen as the immediate precursor to the legalization of gay marriage was eliminated after widespread public objection and protests by evangelical churches. Cuban officials say the question of gay marriage will be put to a nationwide referendum, something most gay activists oppose.

The constitution was drafted by a committee led by Communist Party head Raul Castro, then subjected to months of public comment in workplaces and neighbourhoods across the island. Some suggested changes were approved, others rejected.

As in virtually every vote in recent memory, the National Assembly unanimously approved the draft constitution.</s>related media assets (image or videos) available. Click to see the gallery.

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Cuban lawmakers on Saturday unanimously approved a revised draft of a new constitution that retains the island's one-party socialist system but reflects its socio-economic opening since the fall of the Soviet Union.

HAVANA: Cuban lawmakers on Saturday unanimously approved a revised draft of a new constitution that retains the island's one-party socialist system but reflects its socio-economic opening since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The draft new constitution, which has 229 articles and will replace a Cold War era one, will maintain the Communist Party as the country's guiding force and the state's dominance of the economy, according to state-run media. A copy has not yet been distributed to the public.

The document however also legitimises private business that has blossomed over the last decade, acknowledges the importance of foreign investment and opens the door to gay marriage, according to state-run media.

It imposes age and term limits on the presidency, after late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and his younger brother Raul Castro ruled the country for nearly six decades, and introduces the role of a prime minister.

The current draft incorporates into an original one published in July hundreds of mainly small changes proposed by citizens during a three-month public consultation at community meetings nationwide.

It will go to a referendum next Feb. 24 in a process the government has depicted as participatory democracy at its best.

Critics disagree, arguing the fundamentals of Cuba's system were never up for discussion and the government only included suggestions it wanted to.

Some, including opposition groups that typically do not mobilise many citizens, are already campaigning against the constitution online using the hashtag #yovotono ("I vote no").

First Vice President Salvador Mesa said the government hoped the majority of the population would approve the new constitution because "the people also built this text".

One of the articles revised regards the accumulation of property. Whereas the first draft originally banned this, the revised constitution simply stipulates that the state must regulate it, according to state-run media.

However the latest draft also reinserts the aim of "advancing towards communism" that was taken out of the first draft.

One controversial revision is the elimination of an article that recognised matrimony as the union of two persons as opposed to the union between a man and a woman as in the 1976 constitution.

That article was the one that sparked the most controversy in a society that has made great strides in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in recent years but remains conservative on the topic.

The new draft removes the definition of marriage altogether thus still opening the door to same-sex union albeit not giving it the same symbolic level of backing.

The government has said instead it will update the family code and put it to a referendum in the next two years.

"There is no setback," wrote Mariela Castro, the daughter of Communist Party leader Raul Castro, who has championed LGBT rights in Cuba in recent years, on Facebook.

"The fight continues, let's give a 'yes' to the constitution and then close ranks to achieve a family code as advanced as the new constitutional text."

Still, the change has angered Cuban intellectuals who say fundamental human rights should not be put up for referendum.

"Equal rights to marriage in Cuba should be a presidential decree, not a referendum that exonerates the state from responsibility and opens the door to conservative homophobia," said Harold Cardenas, a professor of Marxism and blogger.</s>Cuba's National Assembly on Saturday approved an update of the country's constitution, the final step before a national referendum expected to approve the new charter in February.

The new constitution contains more continuity than change, although it recognizes the de-facto modernization of Cuban society over the last decade. The constitution maintains Cuba as a centrally planned economy ruled by a single Communist Party, but recognizes private property for the first time and paves the way for a separate referendum on legalizing gay marriage.

It also creates the role of prime minister alongside the current president, as well as provincial governors.

Legalizing private property is a formal recognition of significant change in Cuban society since former President Raul Castro permitted home and auto sales, creating a booming real-estate market, and allowed more than half a million Cubans have permits to work as entrepreneurs. Hundreds of thousands more work full or part-time in the private sector without licenses.

The new constitution also recognizes worker-owned cooperatives for the first time as a legal form of production in every sector of the economy, while maintaining Cuba's largely inefficient and stagnant state-run industries as the central means of production.

Closing the National Assembly, President Miguel Diaz-Canel said the island's economic challenges — including a weak 1.2 percent 2018 growth rate, and similar growth expected next year — required the acceptance of private business, joint public-private ventures and coops working together. He promised to fight widespread public-sector embezzlement and corruption that makes it virtually impossible to get anything done in Cuba without a series of small bribes.

"We've called a battle, and we'll wage it, an ethical battle against corruption, illegality ... and social indiscipline," he said.

The president also promised a more responsive government, part of an initiative that has seen almost all Cuba's head of ministries start social-media accounts for the first time, some of which take questions from citizens.

"There are a lot of questions to pay attention and respond to," Diaz-Canel said. "We'll give responses to all of them as soon as it's possible, and those that we don't' have an answer to for the moment, we'll never stop searching."

He did not mention Cuba's unique two-currency system, which creates inefficiencies and distortions that are seen as one of the island's most serious economic problems. Castro called monetary unification an urgent priority before stepping down in April, but the issue has barely been mentioned since Diaz-Canel took over.

The degree to which the new constitution will actually spur change is expected to be seen only after the National Assembly approves a raft of changes to the civil and penal codes and electoral laws next year.

Language seen as the immediate precursor to the legalization of gay marriage was eliminated after widespread public objection and protests by evangelical churches. Cuban officials say the question of gay marriage will be put to a nationwide referendum, something most gay activists oppose.

The constitution was drafted by a committee led by Castro, who is still Communist Party head. It was then subjected to months of public comment in workplaces and neighborhoods across the island. Some suggested changes were approved, others rejected.

As in virtually every vote in recent memory, the National Assembly unanimously approved the draft constitution.</s>Cuba will leave out of its new constitution changes that would have paved the way for legal same-sex marriage, despite majority support in local assemblies, a government official said on Tuesday.

It was a surprising twist, given public support nationwide for the reform and earlier remarks from lawmakers in the Americas’ only one-party Communist regime.

The measure would have changed the definition of parties in a marriage from man and wife to “between two people.”

But “the draft constitution will not define which parties enter into a marriage … So that is now out of constitutional reform discussions overall,” Council of State secretary and drafting coordinator Homero Acosta was quoted as saying by state media.

The full draft constitution was put before neighborhood and workplace assemblies for debate between August and November. The marriage issue was the one that drew the greatest attention.

“Article 68 was the one most discussed by the people in the popular consultation, in 66 percent of the meetings (of citizen debate). Of the 192,408 opinions, 158,376 propose replacing the measure now in force with the one proposed,” Cuba’s National Assembly said on Twitter.

“The (text-drafting) Committee proposes deferring the definition of marriage to the draft constitution, as a way to respect all opinions.”

The new draft, with the changes made, will be taken up Friday by the National Assembly and then submitted to a popular referendum on February 24, 2019.

One of the main defenders of the LGBT community in Cuba is Mariela Castro, a daughter of Fidel Castro. She said Tuesday on Facebook that the fight to defend these people will go on despite the scrapping of the proposed constitutional change.

“We have not yielded, nor will we yield to conservative and backward blackmail that is politically opposed to the emancipating project that is the Cuban revolution,” she wrote.

Ahead of its annual session, Acosta on Tuesday told the National Assembly that 60 percent of the text’s articles had undergone some type of change.

The commission drafting the new constitution proposed a new article replacing 68, number 82, which defines marriage “as a social and legal institution.”

The committee also deemed marriage “one of the forms of family organization”, which “is based on free consent and equality of rights, obligations and legal capacity of the spouses.”

Separately, the definition of marriage will be left to the Family Code, which will spell out who can be in a marriage.

Those details will be put to a referendum vote within two years of the draft transitional provision, the National Assembly said.

The definition will acknowledge that a shared life and shared family are part of a special legal construct.

The failure to launch of the reform as expected comes during the term of the first post-Castro president, elected in April, Miguel Diaz-Canel.

It would have marked a sea-change on the island where sexual minorities were stigmatised in the wake of the Castro revolution in 1959.

LGBT people were harassed and some were sent to re-education camps, after which they were excluded from any public appointment.

Diaz-Canel has backed same-sex marriage since taking office and said the change “responds to the problem of eliminating all types of discrimination in society.”

It has also been championed by Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela Castro, who has been a staunch supporter of gay rights in Cuba.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.</s>Cuba’s government said Tuesday that language promoting the legalization of gay marriage will be removed from the draft of a new constitution after widespread popular rejection of the idea. Gay rights advocates had proposed eliminating the description of marriage as a union of a man and woman, changing it to the union of “two people … with absolutely equal rights and obligations.”

That change drew protests from evangelical churches and ordinary citizens in months of public meetings on the new constitution. Cuba’s National Assembly announced on Twitter that a powerful commission responsible for revising the constitution has proposed eliminating the language from the new charter “as a way of respecting all opinions.”

The constitution would instead be silent on the issue, leaving open the possibility of a future legalization without specifically promoting it. The constitutional commission is headed by Communist Party head and former president Raul Castro.

His daughter, Mariela Castro, is a lawmaker known as Cuba’s highest-profile advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual rights. Her advocacy has helped rehabilitate Cuba’s international image on LGBTQ rights after the Castro-led communist government sent gay men to work camps in the 1960s. Widespread persecution continued through the 1970s.

While Havana and some other Cuban cities have flourishing gay communities, anti-homosexual attitudes remain deeply rooted among much of the population. Cubans who ordinarily shy from open criticism of the government spoke out in large numbers against the proposed constitutional Article 68 promoting gay marriage during public consultations on the draft constitution throughout the year.

Cuba’s rapidly growing evangelical churches also staked out positions against the article, increasing pressure on a government unused to public pushback. The new charter is expected to be offered for approval at a public referendum in early 2019.

The dropping of the gay marriage language is the third dramatic reversal this month for a government that for decades has issued most laws and regulations with little public debate or insight into the working of the ruling Communist Party. The government last week eliminated some of the most-disliked sections of new restrictions on entrepreneurs that were met with widespread public criticism. And tough new limits on artistic expression were delayed after protests and complaints from Cuban artists.

The new laws were announced in July, three months after President Miguel Diaz-Canel took office, and generated bitter complaints from entrepreneurs and artists. The measures included limits on the number of business licenses per household and barred more than 50 seats at private restaurants. They also granted a corps of cultural “inspectors” the power to immediately close any art exhibition or performance found to violate Cuba’s socialist revolutionary values.

On Dec. 4, the country’s vice minister of culture said the art regulation would be delayed and the inspectors’ power would be limited to making recommendations to higher-ranking cultural officials. In addition, they will not be able to inspect any studio or home that is not open to the public.

The next day, the government eliminated the limits on restaurant tables and business licenses, along with new taxes and financial requirements for entrepreneurs.

The elimination of gay marriage appears to be the only major change to the draft constitution. State media said that Cubans had made 192,408 comments on Article 68, with the majority asking to eliminate it. Commenters also asked the commission to eliminate presidential term and age limits and allow direct presidential elections but the draft charter maintains the two-term limit, maximum age of 65, and the selection of the president by the National Assembly.

Francisco Rodriguez, a Communist Party member and gay blogger known as “Paquito de Cuba,” said simply eliminating any reference to the participants in a marriage is an acceptable compromise that will focus gay activists on campaigning for changes in the national legal code that would allow gay marriage.

“This was a side step,” he said. “It’s a solution. Not `between a man and a woman’ or `between two people.’ Now is when it all begins.”</s>HAVANA: Cuban lawmakers on Saturday unanimously approved a revised draft of a new constitution that retains the island’s one-party socialist system but reflects its socio-economic opening since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The draft new constitution, which has 229 articles and will replace a Cold War era one, will maintain the Communist Party as the country’s guiding force and the state’s dominance of the economy, according to state-run media. A copy has not yet been distributed to the public.

The document, however also, legitimizes private business that has blossomed over the last decade, acknowledges the importance of foreign investment and opens the door to gay marriage, according to state-run media.

It imposes age and term limits on the presidency, after late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and his younger brother Raul Castro ruled the country for nearly six decades, and introduces the role of a prime minister.

The current draft incorporates into an original one published in July hundreds of mainly small changes proposed by citizens during a three-month public consultation at community meetings nationwide. It will go to a referendum next Feb. 24.

“This process is a genuine and exceptional demonstration of the practice of power by the people and therefore of the markedly participative and democratic nature of our political system,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel told the national assembly in a speech closing its week-long, twice-yearly session.

The 58-year-old took office from his mentor Raul Castro in April although the latter remains head of the Communist Party until 2021.

Critics say the fundamentals of Cuba’s system were never up for discussion and the government only included suggestions it wanted to.

Some, including opposition groups that typically do not mobilize many people, are already campaigning against the constitution online using the hashtag #yovotono (“I vote no”).

One of the articles revised regards the accumulation of property. Whereas the first draft originally banned this, the revised constitution simply stipulates that the state must regulate it, according to state-run media.

However the latest draft also reinserts the aim of “advancing toward communism” that was taken out of the first draft.

One revision is the elimination of an article that recognized matrimony as the union of two persons as opposed to the union between a man and a woman as in the 1976 constitution.</s>The reference to communism that had been left out of the first draft of a new Cuban constitution has been made a part of the document in response to a request from more than 1,800 citizens, Communist Party daily Granma said Friday.

Yusuam Palacios, a lawmaker representing Holguin, said ahead of parliament's vote on the draft that the preamble of the new charter includes this phrase: "the human being reaches his full dignity only in socialism and communism," Granma reported.
The draft of a new constitution is approved by the parliament of Cuba. It will be put up for referendum on February 24, 2019.