IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 8 ENGLISH | Page 148

A Strategic Proposal Underway
Manuel Cuesta Morúa
Historian and Political Scientist
Spokesman of the Arco Progresista Party
National Coordinator of the Plataforma Nuevo País
Member of the Comité Ciudadanos por la Integración Racial (CIR)
Havana, Cuba

T

he project development process #
Otro18 has been making progress in
two essential directions: defining the
general contents of the popular debate on
electoral systems, association law, and legal
system of political parties; and building
alliances with political organizations, civil
society groups, and other social actors.
Looking ahead it is necessary a triple step:
bringing the popular debate on constitutional
and legal changes to a national level; rigorously refining the tools of deliberative democracy: deliberative poll, rules and requirements to moderate the deliberative
debate; and calling in experts on constitutional reform and political theory specialized
in transition processes. # Otro18 takes up the
minimalist concept of partial and gradual
reforms in a continuous procedure, which
concretize the possible changes in favor of
the people reforms and prevent the public
misperception of a purely theoretical process
without practical significance. We have also
agreed on political feasibility. The latter is
an indispensable requirement for carrying
out the legal and constitutional reforms
based on a real assessment of all the internal
forces. It is important that people can perceive that genuine and concrete changes

may effectively occur by articulating them
from the perspectives of both th civil society
and politics. Such an approach accepts the
challenge of connecting the partial reform
with both the reform of the constitutional
context and the principles of constitutional
law. It´s the only way to open the constitutional reform as a continuous procedure in a
cascade process, in order to grant the internal coherence and to anchor the reform on
the basis of political liberalism, since without it no democracy is possible. A new
window opened with challenges from the
perspective of specific reforms in the legal
space without being constitutional reforms
by themselves. The legal space can be progressively modified without affecting the
hard core of the constitution in its spirit or
substance.The advantage of going now from
the concrete to the general approach lies in
making measurable changes in favor of the
people. Thus, they will generate and ensure
the perception of the process as real and
viable. The political and intellectual challenge is that such an approach requires
conducting the legal and constitutional
reforms in the same process within a compacted segment.

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