Republic and citizen participation in the cuban constitutional history and national legal thought: from the XIX century up to the decade of 1950, 20th century

Abstract

So far, almost two hundred years after Latin American independence, the importance of the fact that America proclaimed itself a republican majority doesn’t escape, and all this forced the radicalization of thought around freedom in the most supreme sense, therefore the return to Rousseau, the return to great French thinkers and the study of the principles of the Roman Law. In the particular case of the independence process just in Cuba in the nineteenth century, it was associated with a republican form "The Republic in Arms", a republic that also had the purpose of abolishing slavery, not only a modernization from the point of view of the form of government, but a deepening in the meaning of the social demands of an era. The closure of this republican ideal in the Cuban 19th century would find its essence in the leading figure of José Martí, who takes the above with a broader dimension of a "republic with all and for the good of all." The reception of Roman Law in Latin America in the Public Law was based from its origins, therefore, on the unity of the Roman system based on the contributions of the principles of Roman-Latin republicanism that were strongly present in some projects and more limitedly in some constitutional achievements during the struggles for independence in America and until the first decade of the fifties in Cuba in particular.