The Family Code

The Family Code covers marriage, divorce, marital property relationships, recognition of children,
obligations for children’s care and education, adoption, and tutelage. The following are Clauses 24, 25,
26, 27, and 28 of the Cuban Family Code:

24. Marriage is constituted on the basis of equal rights and duties of both partners.

25. The spouses must share the same home, be faithful to one another, help, consider and respect each
other. The rights and duties established by this code will subsist in their entirety as long as the marriage
has not been legally terminated, in spite of the fact that for justifiable reasons a common household
cannot be maintained.

26. Both spouses are obligated to care for the family they have created and cooperate with each other
in the education, formation and guidance of their children in line with the principles of socialist morality.
As well, each to the extent of his or her capabilities and possibilities must participate in governing the
home and cooperate toward its best possible care.

27. The spouses are obligated to contribute toward satisfying the needs of faculties and economic
capacities. Nevertheless, if one of the spouses contributes only through his or her work in the home and
child-care, the other spouse must provide full economic support without this meaning that he or she be
relieved of the obligations of cooperating with the housework and child-care.

28. Both spouses have the right to exercise their professions or crafts and must lend each other
reciprocal cooperation and aid to this effect, as well as in order to carry out studies or perfect their
training, but in all cases they will take care to organize their home life so that such activities be
coordinated with fulfillment of the obligations imposed by this code.”

The Cuban people began to discuss the Family Code in the early 1974; they wanted the Family code to
become law in time for the FMC Congress. Aside of this fact, the Family Code was so important to the
Cuban people that they deemed it vital to have a complete and “far reaching” discussion about it.
People as young as junior high school students got enthusiastically interested in the Code, and had
debates and discussions about it as the first law to have tremendous importance to their future. The
plan for the discussion of the code was announced by Blas Roca at the Women’s Congress. Roca was a
very active member of the Orthodox party. And by then he was Secretariat and head of the committee
to draft new laws. He is now the president of the national People’s Assembly. The Family Code was very
important to the Cuban people at the time of its implementation into the Cuban Law books. Like all of
Cuba’s most important laws, the Family Code had been published in a tabloid edition in order for it to
reach everybody in Cuba; virtually every man, woman, and young person who wanted to read and study
it could have access to it. Cuban people are able to quickly master the new code in meetings through the
trade unions, the CDRs, the FMC, the schools, and so on. Because most Cuban citizens attend more than
one of these meetings, people take multiple advantages to learn and discuss the code until they digest
all the information they need to know about it point by point. Because the government wanted to
ensure the Code favors all and not some, people were encouraged at these meetings to ask questions
and suggest additions, amendments, and or deletions. “The way this process works is that a record is
kept of each meeting, the results are sent through the respective organizations to their highest level,
where they are tabulated, computed, and turned over to the original committee (adjacent, at the time,
to the party’s Central Committee, now adjacent to the National Assembly).” The Family Code was
officially given to the Cuban people on March 8, 1975, which marks International Women’s Day in Cuba.