HAVANA (AP) — Cubans have approved a sweeping “spouse and children law” code that would enable very same-sexual intercourse partners to marry and undertake as nicely as redefining rights for small children and grandparents, officials said Monday, however opposition in the countrywide referendum was unusually robust on the Communist Bash-governed island.
The evaluate — which includes extra than 400 content articles — was permitted by 66.9% to 33.1%, the president of the Countrywide Electoral Council, Alina Balseiro Gutiérrez, instructed formal information media, while returns from a few spots remained to be counted.
The reforms experienced achieved unusually powerful open resistance from the growing evangelical motion in Cuba — and lots of other Cubans — even with an in depth authorities marketing campaign in favor of the evaluate, including hundreds of insightful meetings throughout the place and considerable media coverage backing it.
Cuban elections — in which no celebration other than the Communist is permitted — routinely create victory margins of extra than 90% — as did a referendum on a big constitutional reform in 2019.
The code would permit surrogate pregnancies, broader legal rights for grandparents in regard to grandchildren, safety of the elderly and actions versus gender violence.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has promoted the regulation acknowledged inquiries about the evaluate as he voted on Sunday.
“Most of our people today will vote in favor of the code, but it even now has difficulties that our society as a whole does not realize,” he said.
The measure experienced been accepted by Cuba’s Parliament, the National Assembly, following a long time of discussion about these reforms.
A major supporter of the measure was Mariela Castro, director of the Countrywide Center for Sexual intercourse Schooling, a promoter of rights for exact-sex partners, daughter of former President Raul Castro and niece of his brother Fidel.
But there is a solid strain of social conservatism in Cuba and quite a few religious leaders have expressed problem or opposition to the law., stressing it could weaken nuclear people.
Although Cuba was officially — and frequently militantly — atheist for many years immediately after the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro — Raul’s brother — it has come to be extra tolerant of religions about the earlier quarter century. That has intended a bigger opening not only the when-dominant Roman Catholic Church, but also to Afro-Cuban religions, protestants and Muslims.
Some of those church buildings took edge of the opening in 2018 and 2019 to campaign versus another plebiscite which would have rewritten the constitution in a way to let gay relationship.
Opposition was potent more than enough that the govt at that time backed absent.
Cristiana Mesquita, The Connected Press
