Professional judges in Cuba are elected for unlimited terms, serving until they are no longer capable or until removed by the electoral body. Persons seeking to become judges are required to pass an examination given by the Ministry of Justice. The requirements to be a judge include age, citizenship, and a requisite amount of legal experience that varies depending upon which court one is to serve on (10 years for Supreme Court; Five years for Provincial Courts; Two years for municipal courts.) Membership in the Cuban Communist Party is not required to be a judge. In 1988, 43% of the judges were not members of the Party.
Famous quotes containing the words legal profession, legal, profession and/or cuba:
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Hawkins: The will is not exactly in proper legal phraseology. Richard: No: my father died without the consolations of the law.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate between them. When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one’s profession is a satire on the other’s, and either’s success would be the other’s failure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)