More than a thousand same-sex couples have married in the nine months of the Family Code, assured the lawyer Leonardo Pérez Gallardo, one of the drafters of the law. However, the lawyer acknowledges that there is little progress in other aspects, such as the rights of people with disabilities.
On September 27, 2022, the new regulation came into force, which replaced that of 1975 and expanded the notion of marriage to the union of two people, not only between men and women. In addition, it included certain protections for the elderly and opened the possibility for minors to be under the guardianship of close relatives.
In an interview with the newspaper from Espiritu Escambray, Pérez Gallardo, also a professor at the University of Havana, assures that the norm is a “glass that has made us turn our gaze inside the house.” The teacher insists on the merits of the Codeprepared by jurists, but “enriched” by popular consultation.
Pérez Gallardo acknowledges that the Code generated controversy, but interprets that the heated conversations on social networks and during public debates are a reflection of the need to have more spaces for dialogue. The jurist regrets that on the Island there are so many “debts in legal matters of knowledge” from secondary and middle schools to the university, and asserts that the challenge of the norm is to generate a “change of mentality.”
“Have the operators of the law and many civil servants assimilated the challenge of the Code regarding people with disabilities and social inclusion? No”
On the other hand, and for months, the Government allocated resources to campaigns to guide the population to vote yes for the Family Code, without giving space to any dissenting voice. In the process, emigrated Cubans were excluded and only electoral colleges were set up for diplomatic and state missions. Among the voices against the regulation was the Protestant Church and the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba (COCC), who asked their parishioners do not support the text.
One year after its approval, the key principles of the standard are still not applied. “Have the operators of the law and many officials assimilated the challenge of the Code regarding persons in a situation of disability and social inclusion? No,” questions the specialist, who also serves as president of the Cuban Society of Civil and Family Law of the National Union of Jurists of Cuba.
Similarly, the official explained that in these nine months 600 notarial instruments have been approved to regulate human reproduction. “It is a very important achievement, too, the possibility of the solidarity gestationwhich has been very controversial and which is planned with an exceptional nature”, he adds about the so-called surrogacy or surrogacy, a practice against which the left is mostly against throughout the world.
For the Cuban jurist, the Code is above the normative bodies of Latin America and even of some European countries, such as Spain or France, to which he suggests that they “take it as a reference.” Pérez Gallardo does not say that Spain was the third country to legalize same-sex marriage, in 2005, behind the Netherlands and Belgium, that France approved it ten years ago and that both nations have the highest social protection systems in the world. .
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