Ignoring Cuba’s misfortunes for at least one day, the communist island’s LGBTI community euphorically celebrated the result “historical” of the referendum on the family code organized on Sunday 25 September. At 66.9%, according to provisional results released Monday by the National Electoral Council, Cuban voters approved the legalization of “egalitarian marriage” between people of the same sex. “The yes prevailed. justice has been donewelcomed President Miguel Diaz-Canel. Approving the family code is a way of settling a debt with several generations of Cubans. From today we will be a better nation. »
Pending the final results, expected on Wednesday, the government considered the meaning of the vote “valid and irreversible”. And, at the end of the day, Mr. Diaz-Canel and the president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, Esteban Lazo Hernandez, ratified the new family code.
Prohibition of underage marriages
The 104-page document, which also allows adoption for homosexual couples and regulates gestation “solidarity” by people “united by family or affective”, overhauls the 1975 Family Code hitherto in force. It prohibits the marriage of minors – until now authorized from the age of 14 for girls and 16 for boys –, redefines the responsibilities of parents, prohibits corporal punishment within families, establishes the rights of grandparents to maintain contact with their grandchildren after a separation, lays down on paper the duty of protection of the State towards the elderly and people with disabilities, and takes into account the voice of children in the process of custody or ‘adoption. It was to be published urgently in a special edition of the official bulletin on Tuesday, for immediate entry into force.
In this increasingly authoritarian country, this ambitious text, which establishes new rights while those that already exist are regularly flouted, has not failed to provoke controversy. And the results confirm the dissatisfaction of the Cubans towards the regime, which is already reflected in their exodus on an unprecedented scale and in the rise of social protest, linked to shortages and attacks on public freedoms. More than a thousand people have been taken into custody following the historic protests “against the dictatorship” of July 11, 2021.
Warning shot for the regime
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