What is # Otro18? It ´ s a civic project to promote structural changes in both the electoral and the association laws, by opening them to a system of political parties based on electoral integrity to ensure plurality, competition, and transparency in free and democratic elections for public offices on an equal access basis. # Otro18 is actually a project that, starting from the change in the electoral system, will lead to reform the State through constitutional change. Why # Otro18? The appointed president Raúl Castro announced that he will step down from power in 2018. He stated further that it will be an institutionalized transfer of authority through the mechanisms of access to the State, not through the Communist Party. It is important to analyze all this in a new context, where four events coincide in an open beam: the generational transfer of power, the structural renewal of the institutions giving access to the State, the ideological debate within a serious crisis of legitimacy, and the unsystematic openness of Cuba to the world along with the sociological mutation in the Cuban society. It ´ s very importantly that, for the first time, the government is moving in the same direction as the society. Thus, a creative storm is taking shape for the first time in the last 56 years and it creates the necessary and favorable conditions to change the constitution in a procedural sequence. The electoral reform provides the best opportunity for that. The debate is no longer whether there will be constitutional changes, but what kind of constitutional changes would be possible. Contrary to the more widespread opinion that trivializes a scenario of economic reforms first and likely political changes thereafter, the possibility of political reform is already open. Why? Let ´ s start from this negative hypothesis: the relationship between the will of the policy makers in a specific scenario and the possibility of political change is not compelling. The change is also possible when the context reduces the options of rational choice, as it happens in Cuba nowadays. And the problem is that the government faces a delayed generational change in power, which forces to open the political game in order to guarantee certain legitimacy and credibility to the institutions it ´ s trying to strengthen in a forward-looking approach from the historical setting of legitimacy traditionally based in charisma. In such a situation, the transfer of institutional power is a political change in itself because the legitimacy of the upcoming actors is put into question: who represents whom in a changing situation? Which are the criteria of legitimacy: origin, charisma, institutionalism …? So we are in what I would call a creative circumstance, in which all social and political actors are forced to imagine and reinvent their options and status while the paradigms are discussed. How # Otro18 is articulated? By 2018 we want to make a difference with the Project # Otro18, together with other organizations and actors of the civil society and the democratic community in Cuba. # Otro18 primarily pursues the democratization through well-thought-out proposals of legal changes, designed and legitimated by deliberation among citizens, which open the public space and the political game in order to move from reforming the electoral system to making fundamental constitutional re-
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