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Between Citizens and the Socialist State: The Negotiation of Legal Practice in Socialist Cuba

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Raymond J. Michalowski
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Abstract

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In 1973 the Cuban government abolished the private practice of law, replacing it with a system of law collectives known as bufetes colectivos. These law collectives were designed to provide low-cost legal services to the public in ways consistent with the ideology of a nonadversarial relationship between lawyers and the state. I examine both the relationship between the ideological and legal bases for the socialist practice of law in Cuba and the actual practice of law in one bufete colectivo. Using a combination of documentary and ethnographic information to reconstruct the day-to-day practice of law in the bufete colectivo, I examine the ways Cuban attorneys I observed sought to serve their clients' interests and to pursue their own professional goals within an ideological framework that stressed a nonadversarial model of lawyering. I give particular attention to criminal defense which, more than civil cases, often required attorneys to balance their clients' interests against the socialist ideal of nonadversarial lawyering. These attorneys, as intermediaries between citizens and the state, often found ways to utilize the formal framework of substantive and procedural laws to represent clients' interests despite an official ideology that emphasized nonadversarial lawyering.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , 1995 , pp. 65 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I would like to thank Dr. Nancy Reichman, Dr. Niel Websdale, Dr. Nancy Wonders and Dr. Marjorie Zatz for helpful commentaries on earlier drafts.

References

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