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Assembly’s Judicial and Constitutional
Commission, the National Electoral
Commission, at all its levels, and at the
Assemblies of the People’s Power at
both the municipal and provincial levels.
A basic goal in this strategy is to get the
Proyecto Mínimo into the public agenda
in 2016. For this purpose, we will attempt to hold a Consultative Civil Plebiscite by the end of 2016 or in early 2017.
It will offer up the Proyecto Mínimo for
popular consideration. The basic purpose
of this is that the next electoral laws
guarantee three basic demands: plurality
in political society, competition in the
political system, and the direct election
of the President of the Republic. The
introduction of a socially supported
Proyecto Mínimo into the public agenda
makes possible citizen deliberation of
the Maximum Agenda, in which larger
constitutional reform is posited. The
timeline for this deliberative process will
be determined by the dynamics and options we achieve with the Proyecto Mínimo. Consenso Constitucional and
#OTRO18 rely on citizen deliberation,
which is already happening, right now,
via a few organizations like the Partido
Autónomo Pinero, Unión Patriótica de
Cuba and Nuevo País on the Isle of
Youth (Isle of Pines), Santiago de Cuba
and Holguín, respectively. In this specific case, what is going on is the formation and preparation of independent
candidates (we already have 130) for the
next municipal and provincial elections,
in 2017 and 2018. This process reveals
how particularly relevant the tools of
deliberative democracy we’ve been em-

ploying in these territories have been.
How are we beginning to work with these candidates? We have been training
them on deliberative democracy’s techniques so they can be interacting with
the voters and generating a citizen identity in terms of political practices; helping them prepare proposals and public
agendas regarding problems specific to