Larry Catá Backer (Pennsylvania State University – Penn State Dickinson Law) has posted Reconstructing Legality in Cuba: Challenges for Cuban Policymakers, Academics, and Civil Society in Reforming the Political-Economic Model of Caribbean Marxism-Leninism on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This essay examines the challenges that Cuban policymakers, academics, economic actors, and civil society would face in reconstructing a legal order beyond Caribbean Marxism-Leninism—under a regime that, while not liberal democratic, is no longer tethered to the political-economic model formally adopted by the Communist Party and implemented through the State’s constitutional, administrative, and operational apparatus. The analysis proceeds from a central paradox: any reconstruction undertaken while that model is being reformed or replaced must be built from the materials produced by the very system being transformed. The essay identifies the foundational problems confronting such reconstruction: the structural impossibility of “private law” under Marxist-Leninist theory, the dissolution of justice as an independent evaluative standard in both formalist and instrumentalist legal traditions, the role of scholarly communities operating under conditions of constrained intellectual autonomy, and the re-Sovietization of Cuban political-economic doctrine that has hardened rather than relaxed the orthodox framework. Drawing on comparative analysis of Chinese, Vietnamese, and post-Socialist European experiences, the essay argues that the path to legal reconstruction requires confronting—not merely replacing—the normative logic of the system from which it emerges, and that the relationship between law and politics must be rearticulated around a conception of justice that neither the pandectistic tradition nor Marxist-Leninist instrumentalism has adequately supplied. The essay ends with an action plan for reform that draws on the key insights developed in the essay to produce a six phase framework for organizing reform and “Quality Checklist” for reform proposals.
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Lawrence Solum