ABSTRACT
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 non-adversarial relationship between lawyers and the state. The case of Hermann Gutierrez and the stolen cooking oil embodies many of the daily experiences of Cuban attorneys and their clients. The replacement of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary legal system with one built expressly to suit the ideology, exigencies, and practices of an emergent socialist system was a central component of institutionalizing the nation’s new political order after the revolutionary victory of 1959. In his pioneering study of the Soviet legal system, Berman defines law as the “process of ordering human affairs” through the consistent enforcement of norms by the state.
