By Eloy Viera Cañive (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – The Havana authorities have disclosed the contents of an upcoming bill for a “Citizenship Law” that would allow Cubans to acquire or renounce their citizenship.
However, the same bill, once passed, will also grant the Cuban authorities – specifically the president – the power to unilaterally cancel the citizenship of those Cubans residing outside the country, if they engage in “acts that go against the high political, social and economic interests of the Cuban Republic.”
The bill also empowers the president to revoke the citizenship of any Cuban who participates, “in any kind of armed organization, with the objective of threatening the territorial integrity of the Cuban State, its citizens, and other people residing in the country.”
The measure responds to a timeworn yearning on the part of the Cuban bureaucracy. In practice, these government authorities have for a long-time treated hundreds of citizens who oppose the Communist Party regime as “non-Cubans,” although without legal basis up until now. This bill would codify as law the historic tendency of the authorities and their propaganda of classifying and treating political opponents, activists, and independent journalists the government considers “traitors,” as “stateless,” “anti-Cuban,” and “people who should never have been born.”
The measure justifies the president’s power to strip any Cuban of their citizenship under the argument of protecting the interests of the “State” and the “Republic.’ In the real Cuba, however, the State is considered synonymous with the political force that the country’s “president” directs – the Communist Party. The “Republic” as such, doesn’t exist, because in Cuba we have a totalitarian regime that doesn’t correspond to the logic of independent institutions.
Nonetheless, this bill – which many Cubans have been expecting for a long time – can also b