The banking expert and scholar of the Cuban Constitution of 1940, Alberto Luzárraga, proposes that every candidate for public office in a democratic Cuba should present a curriculum vitae and prove at least 10 years of experience in a paid job, regardless of their educational level.
Luzárraga, with 35 years of experience in the financial sector in the United States and Latin America, presented these ideas in an interview for CiberCuba broadcast last Friday.
The expert argues that the mere requirement of a minimum age—30 years for a senator and 25 for a representative, according to the 1940 Constitution—proves to be insufficient.
"Being 30 years old and a representative or senator sounds very nice, but it means that any demagogue with money and the right age can aspire to these positions, and that is one of the major problems we have worldwide," he noted.
Luzárraga clarifies that he does not require a university degree. "I don't care if you're a bricklayer if you've been a bricklayer for 10 years, because you're a good bricklayer, and there are many people without a university education who have a great common sense and know life, and they can be useful," he stated.
As a negative example, he cites the case of a young person supported by a family fortune: "What cannot be is someone who is 22 years old and whose father gave him 10 million dollars to put up a campaign for a representative. That person will vote for anything because they have no education."
Regarding parliamentary control over the cabinet, Luzárraga proposes to eliminate the semi-parliamentary system of the 1940 Constitution, which allowed for "votes of confidence" to be raised against ministers.
That mechanism, he explains, generated demagoguery: "If someone didn't like a minister, to annoy the president, the opposition would raise a vote of confidence against the minister, and the minister had to be changed."
Cite as an example President Ramón Grau San Martín, who responded to a vote of confidence against his Minister of Education by simply swapping roles with the Minister of Finance. "Grau, who was quite, let's say, clever, for lack of a better term, went ahead and said, 'Oh, you don't like the Minister of Education, great, I'll put him in Finance and the Minister of Finance in Education.' That's how you change a minister," he recounted.
Instead, Luzárraga proposes that the ministers appear before the Senate twice a year to provide accountability with concrete data.
"My opinion is that ministers should appear at least twice a year and say, 'Well, this is what I budgeted, this is what I accomplished,' showing everything as it should be—numbers against numbers and things against things, not demagogy against demagogy," he explained.
The expert notes that current technology makes this transparency easier: "Nowadays, the budgets of the ministries can be easily digitized," he remarked.
These proposals are part of a broader debate regarding the necessary amendments to the 1940 Constitution for a future Cuban transition, a text that Luzárraga views as the only legitimate legal framework in contrast to the Castroist constitutions of 1976 and 2019, which were imposed under a one-party system.
Luzárraga also proposes that the high-ranking officials of the regime's nomenclature should not be able to vote in a free Cuba, arguing that they have already been rendered morally and politically ineligible.
The expert himself acknowledges that his ideas are a starting point: "Of course, these are just ideas. Ultimately, this will need to be addressed and studied."
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