forms. In the process of deliberation, two crucial issues have emerged with the force of necessity: a comprehensive constitutional reform and a Constituent Assembly. The constitutional reform is needed to ensure social consistency and viability. From such a perspective, the policy of specific legal reforms must have two relevant traits: the need of constitutional reform becomes more understandable and conspicuous to the citizens in connection with their specific rights and demands, and the link between legality and constitutionality allows the gradual deactivation of the sort of shielding that the constitution has mounted for delegitimizing the exercise of civil and political rights. In this sense it ´ s possible a consensus to work directly on reforming at least three articles: Article 3, regarding the exercise of sovereignty; Article 5, which endowed the Communist Party with an hegemonic and implicit social superiority( its reform would be extended to Article 62, designed to limit the exercise of civil liberties against the socialist State); and Article 137, which clearly excludes the citizens as subjects legally able to reform the constitution. These articles not only provide the typical shielding of the State before the society and the citizens, but also reveal the conceptual distortions in the contractual nature of constitutional law. There is a political precedent that legitimizes and reinforces our project: in 2008 the Cuban government signed the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights( ICCPR) and on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights( ICESCR). # Otro18 should emphasize on this fact as external political factor.
What does Article 3 say?“ In the Republic of Cuba, the sovereignty resides in the people, from whom all of the power of the State emanates. That power is exercised directly or through the Assemblies of the People’ s Power and other organs of the State derived from them, in the manner and according to the rules established by the Constitution and the laws. All citizens have the right to fight, using all means, including armed struggle, when no other recourse is possible, against anyone attempting to overthrow the political, social, and economic order established by this Constitution. Socialism and the social revolutionary political system instituted in this Constitution, proven by years of heroic resistance against all kinds of aggression and the economic war engaged by the government of the mightiest imperialistic power that has ever existed, and having demonstrated its ability to transform the country and create an entirely new and just society, shall be irrevocable, and Cuba shall never return to capitalism.”* This is the key article in terms of contractual basis and political legitimacy. It regulates the fundamental issue of sovereignty by defining its essential source and by building the pyramid that sets the possible and legitimate relationship between the citizens and the State via society. It affects the rest of the constitutional articles and the legality of the acts performed by the States and the citizens. It should be restrained to express— concisely, briefly, and clearly— the essential source of both the legitimacy and the law, which seems quite clear in its first paragraph. The following paragraphs are superfluous. They refer to elements that have no natural connection with the main source of legitimacy and sovereignty; in fact, they limit the full exercise of the sovereign power, since they set a kind of order that can be theoretically and constitutionally established only by the sovereign itself( the people).
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