Chicago Tribune
February 28, 2002
By Laurie Goering

HAVANA -- When Fidel Castro's revolution swept to power in Cuba in 1959, it quickly disparaged lawyers as corrupt and useless vestiges of the capitalist class. That Castro himself was trained as a lawyer didn't matter. Students were steered away from the profession, the University of Havana law school saw its classes folded into other disciplines and over a decade the practice of law faded.

All things legal, however, have made a comeback in changing Cuba, and Debra Evenson has been there on the front lines.

For 20 years, the former DePaul University law professor has been charting Communist-led Cuba's efforts to build a Soviet-modeled socialist legal system and then, after the Soviet Union fell, to transform that system to reflect Cuba's new and sometimes awkward place in a world of globalized markets.

The work clearly has been a personal journey as well. Evenson, long sympathetic to socialist goals, has, like many Cubans, had to struggle to balance her ideals with some of the harsh realities of life in Cuba. She has come away hopeful, conflicted and with a reputation for straight talk and honest criticism that has won her respect both on the island and at home.

Termed a "critical supporter of the Cuban revolution," she says she sees one of the world's last Communist societies not as a model of egalitarian success or as a repressive failure, but as something more complicated, as rich and complex as the island's own history.

"I am sympathetic with socialist systems and ideas, particularly their humanitarian underpinnings," Evenson, a tall, handsome woman in her 50s, says. "But I've never thought of Cuba as a utopia. It has things that work and don't work. People get in trouble when they see it as a utopia or hellhole with nothing in between."

Evenson made her first trip to Cuba in 1982, shortly after joining DePaul University's law faculty. Her husband, a photographer, had visited the island the year before on assignment, and insisted it was a place she had to see.

She arrived at a decisive moment in Cuba's legal history, as the decree-dominated early years of Castro's rule were giving way to efforts to "institutionalize" the revolution by writing its socialist ideals into law. Suddenly, lawyers were back in fashion and the law school at the University of Havana was flourishing again.

"This place was so different and here were these lawyers and judges trying to develop a legal system to serve a socialist economic system," she remembers. Fascinated, she began returning regularly to the island, chronicling the changes for what would become her 1994 book, "Revolution in the Balance: Law and Contemporary Society in Cuba."

Critical praise

The work, published a year after Evenson won a MacArthur genius grant for her work on the legal profession in Cuba, was the first thorough look at Cuba's unique legal system and won widespread praise for its balance and insight -- both in Cuba and at home.

Philip Brenner, an American University law expert, called it "a penetrating analysis of how law and society intersect in a revolutionary setting." And Felix Masud-Piloto, a fellow DePaul University professor, praised it as a "useful and balanced overview" of Cuba's legal system.

Juan Mendoza Diaz, a vice dean in the University of Havana law school, where Evenson has taught classes on the U.S. judicial system and constitutional law, calls her book "a must read for anyone who wants to understand the evolution of law in Cuba over the last 40 years" and praises her "profound" vision.

The law in Cuba, as in most parts of the world, reflects the island's own peculiar history. Its roots stretch deep into the old codes of Spain, Cuba's colonial master, but also show the effects of years of heavy U.S. influence, and of three decades of Soviet bloc membership.

As in the United States, accused wrongdoers in Cuba are innocent until proven guilty, and cannot be made to testify against themselves. Much of the rest of Cuba's legal system is built on the Spanish model still favored throughout much of Latin America, but socialist ideas hold sway on everything from family law to property codes.

Society comes first

Under Cuban law developed since Castro's revolution, husbands are required to share equally in household chores and child rearing -- though that doesn't necessarily happen. Mortgage payments are set at no more than 10 percent of a worker's salary. Personal injury lawsuits are rare, and while juries are unknown, lay judges, chosen from the workplace, sit alongside traditional judges at trials. On almost every matter, the welfare of society is put ahead of individual rights.

That means nobody in Cuba sues his neighbor after falling on the neighbor's steps -- and nobody is compensated, beyond receiving new housing, if the government condemns his home to turn it into a school, or high-priced rental apartments for foreigners. What benefits the government benefits society at large, the thought goes.

The problem, of course, is trying to balance the social good with undeniable individual interests, as when Cuba, in the early 1990s, quarantined AIDS patients in hospitals and group homes as a means of preventing the spread of the disease. The quarantine eventually was relaxed in 1994.

"Every society balances collective and individual rights. Here the emphasis is on the collective," Evenson says. At the start of the AIDS crisis, Cuba opted for preventing the spread of AIDS over individual rights, something "shocking to people in the United States," she admits.

Cuba, however, clearly hasn't found the whole answer in putting society first. Socialist economies have long been plagued, for instance, by workers who don't see much benefit in working hard, particularly when the pay generally is low and layoffs forbidden. That means "if a system wants to survive and flourish there's a need for individual motivation and incentives," Evenson says. The problem is finding a way to make the ultimate goal "social betterment and not individual betterment."

Evenson grew up in New Jersey, in a town with "a very strong sense of community," she says. Her parents owned a store on Main Street, and, as in Cuba, everyone knew -- and looked out for -- everyone else. After earning degrees at Barnard College and Rutgers law school, she went to work for a Wall Street firm, but before long made her way to DePaul, and to the presidency of the National Lawyer's Guild and the Latin American Institute for Legal Services, a Bogota-based project aimed at providing legal services, particularly to the poor.

Moment of change

In 1994, at the depths of Cuba's bitter depression following the Soviet pullout, she left DePaul and began to focus her energies more exclusively on the island. Today, while she maintains a house in Chicago, she also keeps an ancient car in Havana and a modest apartment overlooking a busy intersection in the city's Vedado district.

In 1994, as during her first visit in 1982, she arrived at a moment of dramatic legal change in Cuba. With the island's Soviet trade network in collapse, the government was desperately rewriting regulations in an attempt to build a new economy, one based on foreign tourism and joint-venture investment.

"They were in trouble. They didn't have enough lawyers -- and I was thinking to myself we have way too many in the United States," Evenson remembers.

Foreign trade issues

Through a New York law firm with a license to operate in Cuba, Evenson began representing the Cuban government in U.S. lawsuits, largely based around trade issues. Most recently she represented Cuba in a trademark infringement dispute with Bacardi-Martini U.S.A., which sells its own version of Havana Club rum, made in Barbados.

She also has kept an eye on the continuing evolution of Cuban law, which in the last decade has had to grapple with ideas unheard of in the Soviet state planning period: tax law, trademark registration and a decidedly different labor code.

For decades after the 1959 revolution, Cuba had little need for consumer protection laws. The state produced everything, and nobody sued the state. Now, with foreign trade opening up, Cuba for the first time is working on a law to protect Cuban consumer rights.

Cuba, which is trying to update its contract law and commercial code, also is working on something never before needed in a land where the state owned most everything: a bankruptcy law, designed to help regulate, for instance, what would happen if a Spanish or Canadian joint venture company operating a hotel or auto dealership in Cuba went belly up.

Does all this mean Cuba's headed down a capitalist legal road? Not really, Evenson says. "I don't know where everything will end up," she admits. "It's a hybrid."

What she is sure of is that Cuba's socialist legacy will linger, even after Fidel Castro's death.

"People have the idea it will be one day this and the next something else. That's not going to happen," she says. Even now, Castro is not the only one making decisions in Cuba; a host of bright politicians and bureaucrats, from Economic Minister Carlos Lage to Central Bank chief Francisco Soberon, are wielding day-to-day power, she says.

More important, she says, she believes the deep sense of community built in Cuba over years of socialist rule will linger beyond Castro.

"In four decades" of the revolution, she says, "that may be one of the most important impacts."