CAMAGÜEY.-The bourgeois revolutions marked the course of the constitutional exercise as the process that establishes the limitation of the exercise of the political power and hoists the rights of the individual opposite to the State. The Constitution is a norm of relation and principles, which governs the juridical arranging and the ties between the political power and the people. The first one, that of the United States, dates of 1787.

In the condition of Cuba as a Spanish colony, the texts written in the 19th century had little validity, since they were not adapted to the reality of the Island and to its political conflicts.

For 1869, after the beginning of the armed hostilities, the Cuban raised against the metropolis met to agree a liberating legal body that was uniting the prescripts of the contest.

With the Constitution of Guáimaro the mambí constitutionalism is born with the intention of legitimizing the pro-independence movement, at the time that it institutes also the Cuban State with the first call to the Republic, in this case in Weapon.

This text comes out like the first one of its type, with idealistic spirit, big influence of the French illumination, and excellent aspects like the inclusion of the women's rights, the recognition of which all the human beings are born free and equal in rights and the establishment of the concept of national sovereignty.

Come the Agreement that in The Zanjón bitterly finished the contest, in Baraguá the “immense mulatto” not only protested the deposition of the weapon, but he sowed the essence of a Great Letter that written in the same day of March 15, in its brief extension was saving the Cuban dignity that it had for 10 years in the swamp.

In its body it gives revolution connotation to the insurrectionary process, character joined to the provisional government, dedicates the principle of peace on the base of the independence, establishes a “knowledge and assent of the people” like actor not only of the struggle, but of the government exercise for proper right.

The Constitution of Jimaguayú (1895) is a reflex of the legalistic and republican vocation of the revolutionary process and of the intention of that this one has its cover in juridical norms, the State is legitimized and there is established the democracy as quality of the Republic for which one fights.

Of a constituent assembly it resulted from La Yaya (1897); it establishes the regulation of the individual rights and of the suffrage, deposits the power in the only organ that designs in a more finished way “from the point of view organizational and structurally - functional” and introduces concepts as that of citizenship. These two last ones recognize the existence of the only control, original precedent of the current organization of government.

In the mambí constitutionalism, there is the cell of the State and of the Cuban legality, its texts notice the political function of the legal body on having recognized as a target of the struggle for the independence, the right and the sovereignty.

The Republic that was made official in 1901 endorses its sustenance in a Great Letter characterized by the longest constituent process of the Cuban history. Although it had aspects as polemic as the regime of local administration and the peculiarities to exercise the vote, it gave the possibility to the foreigners who had belonged to the Liberating Army of acquiring the Cuban citizenship, included guarantees mechanisms to the rights, and had a liberal tendency.

The center of the debates was in the relations with the United States. Contradictorily its Article 1 admits that Cuba is an independent and sovereign State, and the 43 establishes that the government must be conscious of that the United States can exercise the right to intervene. Independence goes!

In Guáimaro, there was signed the Constitution of 1940, the July 1st of this year, which describes the native symbols and defines official language, details the regulation of the rights, and the system of protection and suspension of the same ones. It takes progressive aspects as the protection of the childhood, the maternity, the responsibility of the State with the education; rights to employment, to the minimum wage, to the remunerated rest, and it proscribes the large estate.

It tried to cover of Cuban identity and from progress to a body as bourgeois as its predecessor. Violated almost from its birth with the Batista´s coup d'état in 1952, it did not have practically validity up to the victory of January, 1959, when the Fundamental Law is proclaimed. Conceived on the bases of that of ‘40, recognizing essential changes as the confiscation of goods and properties, protected the transformations in the economic and political bases of the stage, and gave sustenance to the period of provisional nature of the Revolutionary Government. Then there was caused a process of juridical legitimization and fundamental institutionalization up to coming 1975 and with it to the first steps for the Constitution of 1976.

This one had a wide democratic making process, by means of popular consultation. It represents a rupture in the national constitutional history, since it accentuates the social - protective character and is written from the principle of the socialistic constitutionalism applied to our concrete conditions. It denies the tri-parties of powers, a heredity of the mambí constitutionalism, at the time that it recognizes the differentiation of functions that corresponds to every power on the base of the work of organs that have a narrow relation and are the base of the State. Since then it has been reformed in three occasions.

A Constitution has corresponded to every time, always on the base of the independence, the sovereignty and the rights, patented even when they were fighting by force of machete, essence of the nation, of the Republic and the people that it represents.

Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez