My quick read seems to me that these are things that exist in most developed Western societies today: same sex marriage, equal sharing of domestic responsibilities, prenuptial agreements, assisted pregnancy. There's probably more to it - but probably the more significant news is these concepts are taking root in Cuba?
> What is being discussed in Cuba goes beyond anything existing in the rest of the world, but the most astounding thing is how democratic the process is.
We had something similar to discuss Education in Argentina in 1984-1988, it was called "Congreso Pedagógico Nacional". There were a huge number of meetings in each school and they selected delegates for the next step, and after a few steps all the delegates were members of the different political parties or the church. So the final steps were more political and with very few grassroots participation.
> Twenty-seven years after that call, in which 400,000 people participated, two conclusions emerge. In these meetings, little is said about pedagogy and much about educational policy (and generally more about politics than education). The second lesson is that already at that time there was talk of a profound educational crisis.
> Raúl Alfonsín entrusted the organization of the congress to his educational team, headed in 1984 by Minister Carlos Alconada Aramburú , and Deputy Adolfo Stubrin, both with statist approaches. The Statist Approach was driven by radicals and communists ; and the non-statist approach, which was finally the one that triumphed, was defended by the Argentine Episcopal Conference , the Christian Democratic Party , the Justicialist Party , the Union of the Democratic Center , the Integration and Development Movement and a huge mobilization of parents who had their children in private schools. 400,000 people participated in that call.
> Quick and incredibly shallow, yet the most prominent comment in the thread.
> What is being discussed in Cuba goes beyond anything existing in the rest of the world
Goes on to not give a single example of it going beyond anything existing in the rest of the world.
Parent mentions it in their post: this is not some law handed down from a court or imposed by Congress
Cuba is redefining its family law all at once, not via piecemeal disjointed legislative “victories”, but via a public referendum that goes against the established culture
How could that legislation be democratic if it goes against the established 'culture' the majority is in favor of? A democratic outcome would be one that follows the majority opinion that has been established. An outcome against the vote of the majority would not be 'democratic' (although it may be more equitable or better protect rights of minority).
Of course, on the democratic side it's hard to really call a system democratic when merely conveying ideas results in jail time, such as "Ladies in White" who have been arrested for activity like holding up a sign in a park that says "stop hunger."
You posted some very low effort answer you were ashamed of, canceled it AFTER I already answered you and now you post more nonsense and expect me to give you attention again?
I'm afraid you're not familiar with how things work in Cuba.
In short, you mustn't believe much of what you read on Granma, which is the official newspaper, fully controlled by the government. It's not free press, it's a government propaganda machine.
No one can publish a response or contradicting article there, or in any other newspaper in Cuba. There is even legislation to prevent what they call "free press" online.
What this article refers to as a "democratic process" is in reality a quick assembly at work places and your neighborhood, organised by the government and the only legal party (the Cuban Communist Party).
Assistance is mandatory, or you risk losing your job or place at university.
Voting against will have the same consequences.
So, yes, a lot of people were asked if they were in favour or against the new family code, but they were all coerced.
More importantly, those people cannot choose their own government because only one party is allowed in the country, and a huge repressive state controls their every move.
It's an anonymous account because I'm Cuban, with family still living in Cuba, and even after many years living in a different country I don't dare to say anything bad about the Cuban government because I'm afraid they won't let me in next time I go visit my family, or even worse, that they won't let me out!
Also, please don't equate Cuba the country to Cuba the government. They are two very different things.
No need to throw shade. If I come across granma.cu which bills itself as "OFFICIAL VOICE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CUBA CENTRAL COMMITTEE", I'd like to get another perspective. Not that Reuters is necessarily that perspective... but it is most likely a more neutral source.
> USA states cancel abortion rights with unilateral decisions from the top, while the population protests in disbelief.
I would argue that's a very shallow (and incorrect) perception of the abortion debate in the US.
Even once you read Reuters you still decided to go for a very shallow view. Reuters explains a lot of stuff, but you only cherry picked what was supporting the idea that Cuba is inferior to the democracy you live in.
One of Castro's favorite methods of redirecting criticism against Cuba was to explain that the US did as bad or worse.
I'm quite sure the US has done many worse things than Cuba. However that doesn't absolve criticisms of Cuba, especially some particularly egregious flaws that cast into doubt its 'democratic' process.
Listen, I know modern media made us jaded and mistrusting by default, so this might get brushed under carpet as "Well all politicians lie." but countries like Cuba take propaganda to another level.
The default stance when reading any of their official news source, as it was in Czechoslovakia several decades ago, is to believe the opposite.
And all news sources are official news sources.
There are no evil capitalists, remember? So no privately owned printers, TV studios etc. By default everything is state owned or controlled. And state has a single party in charge, by law.
Calling any process in that sort of state "democratic" is about as sensible as calling Amazon union friendly.
Actually, that's a fitting analogy. Consider a company town, single employer, running everything. Mayor and councilors are managers on company payroll. And nobody can start a new business unless they have a go ahead from them. The town also makes it's own laws. By the way, the town has a jail and people can be, and routinely are, locked up in there for disagreeing with how things are run.
What kind of democratic debate can you have in a place like that?
It’s funny, I live in the US and have been publicly critical of various aspects of the last 7 presidents and no one has jailed me yet for that criticism or even threatened me in any way.
When the government behaves worse than a criminal, it is only heroic to expose its crimes. Especially heroic when you know it's a violent, arrogant and vindicative government.
I don’t disagree, but Snowden and Assange’s legal issues are due to criminal acts, not because of political speech.
You can certainly create justification around those criminal acts being for the greater good, but that doesn’t mean that they are no longer criminal acts.
Earlier you praised democracy being the system by which the "population" decides "their own political matters." You go on to cite this democratic system where "46,000 neighborhood meetings" determine family law as being exemplary citizenship involvement and democratic process.
Then you take a viewpoint (legalize polymarous marriage, basically) that goes against the democratic majority in the US and Cuba. Wanting to force an anti-democratic solution while praising democracy as the solution is contradictory.
Do you want polyamorous marriage, or do you want democratic decision making on family law? Until the public opinion changes, you can only pick one.
We can't vote on human rights, we can't vote on economic policy, we can't vote on foreign policy, then what is left to vote? How can you call this democracy?
I'd agree that your argument at least has merit, and I'd point out your argument is counter to 'pastacacioepepe' glorification of democracy as the tool for settling these rights.
Of course down in the weeds is 'what are human rights' which is often settled by democratic process. It turns out to be a nasty problem determining who decides what human rights really are.
It might surprise you but I want both. I want civil rights and I want a strong and partecipated democratic process. The democratic process will always win tho. Any right that is "imposed" rather than conquered will not last.
> that goes against the democratic majority in the US and Cuba
Maybe in the progressive US, not in Cuba, where 54% of the voters are in support of the proposal. The contrarians are not the communist by the way, but the Cuban catholics.
I read both articles but I went back to re-read them, as I'm willing to be proven wrong. Neither mention anything about polyamorous marriage, and definitely nothing about 54% support for it. They mention traditional (2-person) same-sex and cis marriages.
The majority of people are heterosexual, every other orientation is in the minority. The natural state is 50% male, 50% female. Roughly meaning most people will find a match. We are not at some enlightened stage where genders are truly equal, this scenario at this stage would just lead to a situation where we just regress to multiple wives to one husband. 25% of the male population have two wives that's 25% of the population with no prospect of funding a partner, stretch that to three wives and that means half of men have no prospect of finding a partner.
This stuff is well studied in countries that allow polygamy, men become angry sex offenders and jealous spouses take it out on other partners children. It's not good stuff, were not there as a society, we'd need to be at a stage where we all just date other humans and I don't see anyone doing that anytime soon.
>A comprehensive survey of traditional societies in the world shows that 83.39% of them practice polygyny, 16.14% practice monogamy, and .47% practice polyandry. Almost all of the few polyandrous societies practice what anthropologists call fraternal polyandry, where a group of brothers shares a wife. Nonfraternal polyandry, where a group of unrelated men shares a wife, is virtually nonexistent in human society. Why is nonfraternal polyandry so rare? [0]
While human nature can change, something as fundamental as human sexual family unit preferences radically change from favoring polygny over an order of magnitude more than polyandry seems unlikely to be overthrown simply because of changes in democratic opinion on legitimacy of polyamory. Using history as an imperfect precedent, one could make an educated assumption the balance will tip towards leaving lots of unmarried men on the sidelines rather than unmarried women. Evolutionary constraints may also push against having women on the sidelines, since the sexual reproduction throughput is rate-limited by females. There is little evidence to suggest polyandry is as common as polygny.
We're only now discovering that a significant chunk of society is not cis, because we've been forcing them to hide this fact over the past centuries because of religious anachronisms. Why assume it's different with polyandry?
I'm willing to be proven wrong, but it seems fairy reasonable to assume if a strong pattern emerges across a variety of different disjoint and poorly connected traditional societies with unique religious systems, that the pattern isn't likely to be explained away by simply pointing to recent (past few centuries) religious anachronisms.
Of course if a pattern were to emerge in the vast majority of religions across time and cultures I may be tempted to speculate it's a display of common human traits and rather than something to be assigned to a particular religion. In that same vein one draws the conclusion favoring non-cis behavior is probably a minority (but common) human trait (all humans may enjoy some non-cis behavior but most seem to favor cis behavior) and polyandry is unlikely to counterbalance polygny.
"over the past centuries because of religious anachronisms" is your words. Were you lying? YOU were the one that attributed this persecution as 'anachronisms' of 'past centuries.'
>Religiously motivated persecution of sexual minorities
When did anyone say minorities haven't been persecuted? Total straw man out of left field.
I guess I was foolish enough to think you would have said "millenia" or better if you were referring to more than a few (roughly 1-9 IMO, but that's semantics) centuries. Mea culpa.
In my parts people rarely use the word 'centuries' to refer to periods larger than 1000 years, and numbers less than 10 are generally ok to think of as a 'few.'
With your follow-up clarification, I amend my statement:
>I'm willing to be proven wrong, but it seems fairy reasonable to assume if a strong pattern emerges across a variety of different disjoint and poorly connected traditional societies with unique religious systems, that the pattern isn't likely to be explained away by simply pointing to recent (past few centuries) religious anachronisms.
TO
I'm willing to be proven wrong, but it seems fairy reasonable to assume if a strong pattern emerges across a variety of different disjoint and poorly connected traditional societies with unique religious systems, that the pattern isn't likely to be explained away by simply pointing to "past centuries" religious anachronisms.
Sharing a household with a genetically unrelated adult is one of the biggest risk factors for experiencing child abuse. This is well known and well supported by evolutionary psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_effect
Therefore, introducing additional genetically unrelated adults into a family would likely increase the risk of child abuse.
The fallacy is to say that we can't have legalized polyamory because it's negative for the children, while we allow sistemic issues to have a much greater negative effect on said children.
> and nobody is abolishing your civil rights
Hello Texas? What are we even talking about?
> Civil rights don't mean you can do whatever you want.
I never said this, but if you needed to remind yourself of it go ahead.
While I don't necessarily agree with your stance about systemic issues, I would like to point out that solving them would take a lot more work than simply not legalising polygamy, and I don't see why we should neglect taking measures we are actually capable of implementing in favour of a pipe dream that might never be implemented.
I agree. You do both. If revolution is not immediately possibile, you fight for reform instead, hoping that it will sow the seeds of the revolution in those who fought with you. Any small victory for social movements generates a strong taste for solidarity and the expectation that the victory can be repeated.
When the US legalized gay marriage (at least for now), one of the talking points against it was that men could marry their sons to avoid the inheritance tax, the same idea you are talking about. But the fact is fathers could marry their daughters and mothers could marry their sons to avoid taxes before that law was passed, yet it wasn't done. It was all just a smokescreen.
The other funny thing was that the people against gay marriage by and large were also against inheritance taxes, so you'd think they'd applaud a new loophole.
> But the fact is fathers could marry their daughters and mothers could marry their sons to avoid taxes before that law was passed, yet it wasn't done.
No fathers cannot marry their children. Nor can mothers. That is illegal in every state I believe.
That's true: in US you can legally marry a child ("the youngest girls to marry in 2000-2010 were three Tennessee 10-year-old girls who married men aged 24, 25, and 31, respectively, in 2001", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_S...), but not your own child.
Although I'm sure there are ways around it if you are wealthy enough.
(ps "Human Rights Watch pointed out that Afghanistan has a tougher law on child marriage than parts of the United States")
So... they've gone from "gays go into camps" to "gays can have all the rights of family". That sounds like progress to be celebrated to me. It's sixty years later and things are getting better, hooray?
I mean, any discussion of shit getting better in the USA sure has a laundry list of atrocities you can dig up too.
Lots of countries were doing very bad things 60 years ago. Lots of countries were doing very bad things yesterday. That shouldn't stop us from celebrating when one of those countries stops doing those bad things or makes progress to treat people more fairly.
Except that nothing has changed. People don't have the right to protest or to vote. It's still the same authoritarian government with a nice coat of pink. Coincidentally this changes very little for the islands lgbt community which is still quite persecuted (by the government no less)
There are only 31 countries in the world that respect marriage equality. The fact that Cuba is going to be 32, in front of half of continental Europe is a good thing for Cuba.
> This is the same communist party that put gay people in concentration camps in the 1960s.
There are still parents in the USA who are currently sending their kids to gay conversion camps. I don't understand your point.
I think the OP is attempting to point out the abysmal record of gay rights in communist systems. Be it communism of the 60's, or modern communism like that practiced in China, gay's are second class citizens...tragically denied the rights enjoyed by heterosexuals.
> In 1962, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic decriminalized same-sex sexual intercourse after scientific research from Kurt Freund led to the conclusion that homosexual orientation cannot be changed.
Meanwhile, in USA:
> In 1962 Illinois adopted the recommendations of the Model Penal Code and thus became the first state to remove criminal penalties for consensual sodomy from its criminal code,[7] almost a decade before any other state.
There is an abysmal record of gay rights across all parts of the political spectrum, including using sexual orientation as a political tool of oppression. There's nothing special about communism.
Presumably getting purged for being "Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors" is considered a better option than being purged for being gay?
I mean technically you can choose to be a `Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist` traitor or any other flavor of traitor, but you can't really choose who you're attracted to.
My quick read seems to me that these are things that exist in most developed Western societies today: same sex marriage, equal sharing of domestic responsibilities, prenuptial agreements, assisted pregnancy. There's probably more to it - but probably the more significant news is these concepts are taking root in Cuba?