Osvaldo Dorticos, Cuba’s Last President

Vicente Morin Aguado

HAVANA TIMES — This year’s second issue of Verde Olivo (“Olive Green”) magazine, the official journal of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, ran an article commemorating Osvaldo Dorticos Torrado, the last president of the Republic of Cuba, the title for the nation’s highest authority used in the five constitutions Cubans ratified up to 1976, when the sixth constitution – the first openly declaring the country’s socialist system – was approved.

Dorticos, a brilliant attorney from Cuba’s province of Cienfuegos, set his signature to every law decreed by the revolutionary government for seventeen years, in adherence to the constitutional mandate of 1940, which was the highest legal authority in the country until it was abolished in 1976. No other president remained in office for as many years as he did.

He was not offered the country’s presidency solely because he was an exceptional jurist. Under Batista, he was detained on several occasions, particularly following the military uprising which took place on September 5 in his native city, where he served as the coordinator of the 26^th of July clandestine movement. The honest legal expert lived in Mexico as an exile until January 1^st, 1959, when Cuba’s bearded revolutionaries entered Havana triumphantly.

We know nothing of how Dortico’s conscience fared in the legal limbo Cuba fell into, and has yet to come out of, since the triumph of the revolution. During their struggle against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, the rebels led by Fidel Castro had demanded the reinstitution of Cuba’s Constitution of 1940, which had been trampled on by Batista’s military regime.

We should take note that, on February 7, 1959, Cuba’s first provisional president following the revolution, Manuel Urrutia Lleo, promulgated the Fundamental Law (Ley Fundamental), which reproduced the 1940 Constitution, but granted the new government extraordinary legislative faculties. The minister tasked with formulating the country’s new legislation, the man I am now writing about, would soon become Urrutia’s immediate successor.

Until 1976, Cuba was governed through decrees issued by the Council of Ministers, made up of something more than twenty people who served as the nation’s legislative body. The new socialist constitution created the positions of Chair of the Council of State and Chair of the Council of Ministers, both of which Fidel Castro, and his designated successor and brother Raul, held.

We know nothing of how Dortico’s conscience fared in the legal limbo Cuba fell into, and has yet to come out of, since the triumph of the revolution. During their struggle against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, the rebels led by Fidel Castro had demanded the reinstitution of Cuba’s Constitution of 1940, which had been trampled on by Batista’s military regime.

Experts on the subject tend to agree that our last constitution has evident limitations. Dorticos, a professional of such merit that he was elected Chair of the Cuban Lawyers’ Association in the 1950s (in spite of his communist leanings and involvement in anti-Batista activities), was one the people who had to deal with its shortcomings.

The document ratified by Cuban citizens in 1976 is short and worded in overly general, imprecise terms, leaving a wide margin for the kind of interpretations and improvisation typical of the revolutionary leadership. Most importantly, it fails to clearly define those laws which ought to beset the chief constitutional norms that guarantee the citizen’s inalienable rights.

After stepping down, Dorticos remained in office as one of the vice presidents of the Council of Ministers and later served as the top judicial official until June 23, 1983, when he took his own life with a firearm.

His life has become something of a black hole. There are rumors that he suffered unbearable physical pain, caused by an illness about which we do not have any precise information. He was a simple, home-loving man, very close to his wife, Maria de la Caridad Molina, who had passed away shortly before his suicide.

Turning the pages of Verde Olivo, I see a photograph of Dorticos, walking down a street, at the front and center of a demonstration, locking arms with Che Guevara and Raul Castro. There is another man, among them, whom I cannot identify. They are accompanied by Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, a brilliant mind, a minister of the revolutionary government, a communist from Cienfuegos, like Dorticos.

Surprisingly, there is no street, no park, no school, not one place that commemorates this man. The reason may just be one of those dirty secrets, those unquestionable instructions from above that continue in the shadows. The question remains: why has the last president of the Republic of Cuba been condemned to oblivion?