From the Spanish Civil Foundations to the Soviet Academic Model: Reshaping the Teaching of Roman Law and Legal History in Modern Cuba

Ricardo Pelegrin Taboada

The School of Law of the University of Havana has taught Roman law since its opening in 1728, but its curriculum has been reshaped by different political, legal and intellectual influences during the last three centuries. These movements included secular, positivist and socialist periods that sought the elimination of Roman law, as Cuban legal scholars and politicians transitioned from normativism to pragmatism and, ultimately, to nihilism. Despite these movements of opposition, Roman law survived as some jurists defended its preservation and even promoted its expansion in the curriculum as a foundational element of national legislation. This feature of Roman law was common to the rest of the Latin American countries that were part of the Civil law legal system. In the case of Cuba, however, the relevance of Roman law in the public sphere intimately also involved the faculty teaching those courses, who consistently functioned as active members of the local legal community. At the same time, these scholars implemented major legal intellectual movements in the field of Roman law in Cuba through constant updates to the reading lists and updates to the curriculum. This article argues that the teaching of legal history in Cuba has been closely connected to major national events since the founding of the University of Havana, whose faculty devised various survival strategies to preserve Roman law in the curriculum of the School of Law, and ultimately turning this legal field into part of the Cuban legal identity.

Roman Legal Tradition, 22 (2026), 1-39

DOI 10.55740/2026.1

This work is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0. Copyright © 2026 by Ricardo Pelegrin Taboada. Roman Legal Tradition is published by the Ames Foundation at the Harvard Law School and the Alan Rodger Endowment at the University of Glasgow. ISSN 1943-6483.

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