Hare in Latin America Advisor on Cuba’s Constitution
Amb. Paul Webster Hare, Senior Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was interviewed for a recent article examining the constitutional reform commission in Cuba.
Hare was interviewed for a June 21, 2018 article in Latin America Advisor entitled “Will a Constitutional Rewrite Bring Big Changes to Cuba?”
From the text of the article:
“Through the creation of a constitutional commission, the government can appear responsive to calls for reform but also can play for time. Cuba faces a major philosophical dilemma with economic reforms. Controls have to be loosened, but that loosening will stimulate inequality, long seen as the Achilles’ heel of the Cuban Revolution. None of this was resolved by the excruciatingly slow Lineamientos reform proposals of 2011. Only 21 percent of these had been implemented by 2016. With Raúl Castro as its head, the commission will reject shock therapy. In a speech to the National Assembly last July, he rejected any relaxation of restrictions on accumulation of wealth in the self-employed sector. For example, private restaurants had to stay small. He also lamented the fact that some Cubans now had enough money to enable them to travel widely. The Lineamientos stuck fast to the socialist model, distrusted market reforms, insisted on government price setting and state control of major economic sectors. The constitutional revisions will likely reflect the same principles. Cuba’s bureaucracy is designed to preserve the Revolution. So any new language in the constitution will be largely anodyne. How will private business activities be defined and what shackles will be taken off foreign investment? Social issues like same-sex marriage matter little to the Revolution’s survival, so they can appear progressive. And term limits already have Raúl Castro’s blessing. But it is hard to imagine any Cuban having a spring in their step at the thought of constitutional revisions.”
Amb. Hare teaches classes at Boston University on Diplomatic Practice, Arms Control, Intercultural Communication and on Cuba in Transition. His novel, “Moncada – A Cuban Story”, set in modern Cuba, was published in May 2010. His book “Making Diplomacy Work; Intelligent Innovation for the Modern World.’ was published in early 2015.