Legal System of Cuba

Cuba's legal system began in Spanish civil law but was fundamentally remade after the 1959 revolution, when Marxist-Leninist ideology reshaped it around the doctrine of socialist legality, a principle meant not merely to record existing custom but actively to advance socialist development and equality among citizens. The system passed through a revolutionary phase in the 1960s and 1970s marked by summary courts and radical reform, an institutionalization phase from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s that built formal court structures, and a more recent period of modernization responding to economic change. Cuba's current constitution, adopted in 2019, introduced significant reforms including recognition of limited private property, restoration of procedural protections such as the presumption of innocence, and expanded equality guarantees, while the state continues to closely regulate economic activity even as it selectively permits joint ventures and agricultural cooperatives.