The Third Chamber of the Supreme Court of Spain decided this Tuesday to temporarily suspend the registrations in the electoral roll of those who obtained Spanish nationality under the so-called "grandchildren's law", a decision that directly affects thousands of Cubans who processed their citizenship under this regulation.
The resolution came just 24 hours after the public hearing held on Monday before the high court, where the appealing organizations —Iustitia Europa and the Vox party— warned that the upcoming general elections could be tainted in an "irreparable" way if the automatic registrations in the Census of Resident Voters Abroad (CERA) were not immediately halted.
Both the State Advocacy and the Prosecutor's Office had opposed the measure, describing the damages alleged by the appellants as "potential" and "abstract," as reported by the Spanish newspaper ABC.
The suspension is precautionary in nature and does not resolve the core of the dispute, which is the appeal filed against the decision of the Central Electoral Board (JEC) on July 16, 2026, which the plaintiffs accuse of "abdicating its supervisory function, hiding behind an alleged lack of competencies."
The main argument put forth by those who advocated for the halt is that once the votes have been cast, it would be impossible to reverse their value, which would lead to "irreversible damage" in the elections.
The Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé emphasized during the hearing the scale of the phenomenon: the forecasts of between 10,000 and 16,000 monthly registrations in the CERA were far surpassed by reality, with 29,000 new registrations recorded in just 60 days.
At the center of the debate is an instruction from the Ministry of Justice that expanded the provisions of the Law 20/2022 on Democratic Memory —popularly known as the “grandchildren's law” — by establishing a "general presumption of exile" for those who left Spain between July 18, 1936, and December 31, 1955, without the need to provide documentary proof of that status.
That expansion led to a surge in the number of applications worldwide: according to data from June 2026, a total of 2.5 million requests were submitted, of which only 545,000 had been approved eight months after the deadline, which was on October 22, 2025.
For Cubans, the judicial decision has immediate consequences.
Cuba was one of the countries with the highest demand under this law: the Spanish Consulate General in Havana received over 107,000 applications by September 2025, and it is estimated that around 300,000 people on the island began the process since the law came into effect in October 2022.
The political debate in Spain has intensified around whether the new registered voters in the CERA — many of whom reside in Cuba, Argentina, and other Latin American countries — could sway the electoral outcome in favor of the government of Pedro Sánchez, something that the opposition has denounced as a manipulation of the census for electoral purposes.
The precautionary suspension agreed upon this Tuesday freezes new registrations while the Supreme Court deliberates on the substance of the appeal, marking an unprecedented decision in the process stemming from the Democratic Memory Law.
While the court resolves the substantive issue, those who have already obtained Spanish nationality but are not yet listed in the CERA find themselves in a state of uncertainty regarding their ability to vote in the upcoming elections.
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