Legal argumentation focused on a Municipal Law in Cuba: an imperative for local development

Abstract

The Cuban Constitution upholds the role of municipalities as "the primary and fundamental political-administrative unit of the national organization" endowed with autonomy to manage their local development. In order to be able to enact a systemic, comprehensive, and coherent Municipal Law, in line with changes in management and administration methods in accordance with the current constitutional model and projected local development goals, it is necessary to contribute to the process of laying the groundwork for a Municipal Law, based on legal argumentation in the legislative arena. Consequently, this work aimed to explain the order, content, and scope of the levels of rationale for a Municipal Law in Cuba. To this end, legal methods and materials such as the theoretical-legal method and the document analysis technique were used, which support the relevance of the analyses. As a result of these reflections, the changes and adjustments that need to be introduced to provide content and contextualize the contributions of the authors of the theory of legal argumentation in the legislative arena were specified. From such analysis it was concluded that the legal argument to support a Law of Municipalities in Cuba must be ordered in accordance with teleological, ethical, legal-formal, linguistic and pragmatic rationality, assuming these levels of rationality contained in Municipal Law and the scope allowed by the assumed local development model.