Whenever we can, Abroadia likes to feature the viewpoint of someone from a country where our students study in. This is essential, since the American student narrative is not the only voice that forms part of the abroad experience. We often see (American) student blogs writing about things that, despite the international environment, are US-centric. This is fine, of course, but it is equally important to let others write and share their thinking and feeling.

Today’s blog post will feature a Cuban student who is about to earn her law degree from the Universidad de La Habana. She writes passionately about the influence Ruth Bader Ginsberg has had on her philosophy and growth as a soon-to-be lawyer. This is another example that despite the US embargo, ideas and philosophies can still transcend borders.

Thank you, Dania.

Chronicle of the same dream

“I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability.”

-RBG

The year 2020 begins, and all the images that were once erected distant, sprout again from a near spectrum, turned into almost realized dreams. The anxiety, the fear, uncertainty, and insecurity with which we began our law studies at the University of Havana are left behind, demonstrating that there is nothing more real than the immovable will to be…and to do, and  that we’re about to graduate in July.

Suddenly, the media alarms sound in the distance. Australia burns, world peace is threatened by a politician who plays God by taking the life of one of his opponents in Iran, the light of one of the NBA’s stars turns off in the sky of L.A. In the distance the sound of an ambulance can be heard. This time it is not the smoke caused by the flames that does not let them breathe, but a deadly virus that threatens to become the biggest epidemiological emergency of the century. But, we’re still in January, and this year we’re going to graduate… what could ruin it?

Then March comes, and the reality of an interconnected world becomes common. Cuba begins a new battle against a microscopic enemy that to date has taken the lives of thousands of people around the world.

What’s gonna happen with our prom? – we kept asking to ourselves- but now it was time to reinforce the pillars that support a nation that doesn’t believe in defeat, and some of us did not lack the same will to be and to do, now framed within a single verbal form, to help.

Among all this wave of events, September surprises us with the death of the symbol of feminism of the legal guild of United States of America: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Until then, my vision of her was limited to her justice and legal achievements, her well-known victories in favor of gender equality, and the defense of the national Constitution. The enormous media coverage of this regrettable incident provoked in me a constant concern, the eagerness to know in depth a figure that goes beyond the small judge who boldly broke down the fence of inequality in a nation where civil rights are preached as if they were within everyone’s reach. The incessant question – who was RBG and why did she dedicate her life to defending progressive ideals?- made me think about the inexorable comparative analysis of her dreams, interests, her epoch, her life, her history, because, as I always say, we all are made of them. Could it be that we are different, or, on the contrary, we are united by ties of a morality oriented by sensibility and justice?.

At first, and taking as a premise the idea of a human being is a reflection of their time, I decide to delve in Ruth’s thought by studying the historical moment in which she had to live. Certainly, if we combine her experience within this epochal frame, we will be able to glimpse some of the most accurate and defining lines of her legacy.

Thus we come to the sixties and seventies, a time marked by social activism in the U.S.A. During these two decades, The Unites States experienced the interruption on the political scene of new actors that profoundly transformed society. Among these new social actors, the vanguard movements were the Afro – American population, the pacifist and student organizations, the movement for homosexual rights, the environmental movement, and the feminism movement.

The action of North American social activism in this context generated changes in family relationships, between sexes, couples, in the way in which people visualized themselves as individual beings in constant interaction with their peers. This situation brought with it, that the demand for rights that had already achieved some recognition because of  the levels of social cohesion that existed in those days about the idea that democratic effects could not dispense with the material guarantees of equality between all individuals and sectors of society. It was a true cultural revolution that generated a reformulation of concepts, lifestyles, all of it, hand in hand with the questioning of power and its various instruments, among them, the law.

This was the social climate that Ruth lived through, and whose existence she tried to demonstrate, not from a massive strike in the streets, but from teaching first, and then at the courts. Her greatest enemy, a federal legal system riddled with regulations that revealed clear manifestations of discrimination based on gender, especially in detriment of the female sex.

In defense of particular interests first, when she was a lawyer, and later representing those of the generality of the citizens in her functions at the high judiciary of the Supreme Court, Ruth was in favor of the historical-changing notion of Law as a science, as a social phenomenon. On this basis, it was inconceivable the permanence of legal norms and institutions in conflict with a social reality. That means Ruth incorporated into her professional labor in an extraordinary way a maxim of her Constitutional Law professor who preached: “The judges read the newspaper and are influenced, not by the climate of the day, but by the climate of the time”.

RBG’s legacy is enhanced if we consider that the judicial proceeding in the United States is based on the British common law legal system, where judges use the judicial precedents set by the Supreme Court or courts of appeal as true legal norms of mandatory applicability for lower courts to new cases with similar factual and legal issues. Let’s think for a moment that this dynamic implied the possibility for RBG to channel the future of American legality towards more inclusive, egalitarian, humane, and just paths. Yes, reaching the top of the legal world, meant for her, having a direct impact on social and legal relationships, as they are also creators of laws. She was not just another piece in a high court tinged by the bipolarity of liberal and conservative political affiliations. The experiences that she added to her life made her see the law as a strong weapon to make changes that were already alive in people’s minds.

At this point, I ask myself again how similar and how different could I be from RBG?

Every society is vulnerable to some manifestations of inequality. We have to admit we are human beings differentiated by countless elements. But, what we cannot let happen is preaching equality based on the Constitutional norms without providing real guarantees of its true realization, or worse, to institutionalize inequalities.

Fortunately, it was not gender inequality issues that mobilized my passion for Law. Although the battle against discrimination on the basis of sex is still a long road from a social point of view, Cuban laws have shown the consensus on the political will to offer men and women equitable treatment with regard to the possibilities of participation in the various sectors of social life, and above all, the acquisition of rights and obligations arising from the numerous relationships generated in such environments. It is enough to take a look at our laws about family, jobs, security and social assistance, elections, and clearly, our Constitution, which establishes the principle of equality as one of the axiological guidelines that should radiate the entire network of norms and behaviors that meet the constitutional norm.

I believe that just like Ruth, I am driven by unbridled love for the achievement of a more just society, where each person finds in others an image of similarity, empathy and solidarity, where the differences serve only to remind us the intrinsic diversity of nature. Like her, I decided to become a lawyer with the strong conviction to serve people in the materialization of their dreams and hopes, in the aid of those who claims for solutions to the situations that life puts in its finite and complex course. As lawyers, we act at the request of justice, we owe it to it. We are similar in the desire to know ourselves useful by practicing a profession that requires intellectualism, but also courage, sacrifice and faith in the human being in an increasingly selfish world, indifferent to the simplest and most essential things.

Just like her, we finished our law studies, and we jumped into a different dynamic with no more clothing or armor but our eagerness to continue learning, dressed by dreams of robes and podiums, devising the smile of happiness of that one we helped, of constant legal debates, of evenings of codes and regulations in the search for a good  legal argument, of that future that patiently waits to see us become those who we dreamed when we first climb the 88 steps of the university staircase.

There are many RBG nowadays, and it’s not the result of the trivialization that pop culture made of her image. Her essence is alive in all those people who conceive Law as a way of living because of the values that it contains, its behavior guidelines.

We are already in October, and next month we will graduate. It has been a difficult year, but also full of teachings, among them: that in a world with constant interaction as a rule, and the selfishness of a few threating life, individual well-being depends on everyone else’s, on their responsible conscience, on their sensibility.

But there we will be, in that same place where in the first year we observed with amazement the ceiling paintings, the elegance of each space, and the imposing energy that flows through the room. Where we will receive the materialized fruit of our sleepless nights and friendly smiles that rang out in the front park. And in that moment, I will look at you all with affection, grateful for coinciding in this eternal story full of joys. Then, I will understand that Ruth and I are united by the same feeling of passion for change, for justice, for the same unshakable will, to be useful, and to do good.

Dania Delia Perez Batista

Universidad de La Habana

Class of 2020