The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the forgotten man, and Cuba's human rights legacy

Seventy five years ago on December 10, 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly. In 2008 in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of this important milestone, Mary Ann Glendon, the United States Ambassador to the Holy See, highlighted Latin American and Catholic contributions to human rights, and made special mention of the contribution made by Cuba that was documented in a diplomatic cable.

“The principal leader of the Latin American group in 1948 was a charismatic young Cuban representative named Guy Perez Cisneros. His son, Pablo Perez-Cisneros, attended the conference and recounted his father's contributions to the UDHR, noting the gap between the Cuba of his father's day and the deplorable state of human rights under the present regime. The work of Guy Perez-Cisneros and other delegates was captured in a 12-minute video presentation featuring archival footage of Eleanor Roosevelt and Guy Perez-Cisneros' UN speech in support of the UDHR.”

However, Perez Cisneros was not the architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and until The Washington Post journalist David Hoffman explored this chapter of Cuban history in his 2022 book, Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and his Daring Quest for a Free Cuba, this information was only available in some archives, and obscure blogs. 

 

Hoffman found that the 1940 Cuban Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Article 88g of the 1992 Cuban Constitution that made the Varela Project possible were largely the result of one talented Cuban who over the course of his career had been a diplomat, jurist, and scholar, but you’ve never heard of him. In fact, he has been called the “forgotten man”.

 

Gustavo Gutierrez Sanchez (1895 - 1959)

His name was Gustavo Gutierrez Sanchez and he was born in Camajuani, in the Province of Santa Clara, Cuba on September 20, 1895, and he died in exile in Miami on July 17, 1959 at age 63. In 1916, at just 21 years of age he had obtained doctorates in Civil and Public Law, and became Assistant Professor of International Public Law in the University of Havana, and in 1919 became the department head at age 24.

Carlos Márquez Sterling, a Cuban historian and statesman who led the drafting of the country’s 1940 Constitution, in 1976 wrote an article in Diario de las Americas where he highlighted Gustavo Gutierrez’s role in the drafting of the 1940 Constitution. 

"Gustavo had formed part of the Bicameral Commission which drafted the project of the Constitution and I can assure you that many of the institutions that later found expression in our original document were based on previous works created by Gustavo Gutierrez." 

Hoffman in “Give Me Liberty” reported that the 1940 Constitution had a provision that had been drafted years earlier by Gustavo Gutierrez, and became “Article 135, Section F, which provided that laws could be proposed by congressmen and senators, government officials, courts, - and by citizens. ‘In this case,' the constitution declared, ‘it will be an indispensable prerequisite that the initiative be exercised by at least ten thousand citizens having the same status of voters.”

The Cuban jurist believed that this clause would have given Cuban citizens a voice in public affairs that could have acted as a brake on Machado’s slide into dictatorship, or led to an earlier repeal of the Platt Amendment, or prevented Batista becoming a strong man. This provision somehow was recycled into the 1992 Cuban Constitution, and was the basis for the Project Varela that challenged totalitarian rule in Cuba beginning in 2002.

 

Chapultapec Castle in Mexico City

Less than five years later in February 1945, with World War Two still underway, at the Chapultapec Castle in Mexico City twenty Latin American countries and a large delegation from the United States participated in the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace. Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez presented on behalf of Cuba “two detailed proposals for consideration, a Draft Declaration of the International Rights and Duties of the Individual and a "Draft Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Nations." These two drafts were written by Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez in his book La Carta Magna de la Comunidad de Naciones. Later that year the Cuban delegation in San Francisco would present his draft for consideration in the creation of a universal declaration of human rights.

French jurist René Cassin and Guy Perez-Cisneros argued strongly in the discussion over the drafting of the declaration that the right of individuals to petition “for redress of alleged human rights abuses to ‘the public authorities of the State of which he is a national or in which he resides, or with the United Nations.” was an essential human right that should be included. This was objected to by the Soviet Union, and Mexico that argued that it “violated the principle of national sovereignty and violate provisions of non-interference.” It would not end up in the declaration, but be recognized later by some states. The spirit of this clause that individuals could petition to have injustices committed against them all the way to the UN is consonant with  Gutierrez’s advocacy for giving citizens a voice in public affairs.

Canadian legal scholar John P. Humphrey is credited with preparing the first draft for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947, but in his memoirs published in 1983, Humphrey credited Gustavo Gutierrez for presenting the model that inspired the draft.

“I was no Thomas Jefferson and, although a lawyer, I had had practically no experience drafting documents. But since the Secretariat had collected a score of drafts, I had some models on which to work. One of them had been prepared by Gustavo Gutierrez (Sanchez) and had probably inspired the draft Declaration of the International Duties and Rights of the Individual which Cuba had sponsored at the San Francisco Conference.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an initiative by Latin American nations, in which Cuba played an important role proposing it, assisting to draft the document, and successfully lobbying for it.  

The Cuban diplomats that played this historic role in bringing into existence this “Magna Carta of the Community of Nations” have been erased to make way for one of the great lies of the Castro dictatorship that the political concepts of liberty, equality, and justice are not universal but differ based on geography. This is also why the communist dictatorship in Havana views the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as enemy propaganda.

This is why Cubans across the island risked everything to be heard by the international community in 2002, 2004, and 2021 in their demands for freedom and an end to dictatorship. In 2002 and 2004 this demand was made in the Project Varela petition by tens of thousands of Cubans, and in July 2021 by hundreds of thousands of Cubans across the island shouting for it at the top of their lungs. Currently there are over 1,000 political prisoners in Cuba, and on international human rights day 2023, the 75th anniversary of the signing of the declaration we call for their freedom, and the freedom of all Cubans.