Javier Canosa participated in an International Bar Association sponsored (IBA) training program to prepare Cuba’s lawyers for a new era of legal practice. Designed in conjunction with Cuba’s National Organization of Collective Law Offices (ONBC), the program will address the urgent need to fill the knowledge gap of Cuban lawyers unfamiliar with the workings of commercial contracts and cross-border transactions.
The program started on February 25, 2016 at the ONBC’s resident training centre in Havana and was attended by 40 lawyers from law firms across the Republic of Cuba. The composition of the tailored program, created in consultation with the ONBC, drew on an existing IBA distance-learning LLM program and is supported by ILAC, the International Legal Assistance Consortium.
Participating lawyers who successfully complete the program and pass the final exam will be awarded an IBA Diploma.
Although the launch of the training program comes amid a recent thawing of US-Cuba relations, the groundwork for the initiative began a number of years ago, specifically when Cuba’s current President, Raúl Castro, started to introduce economic reforms in Cuba.
