Cuban lawyer Osvaldo Soto, tenacious fighter against discrimination, dies

January 26, 2021

The prominent fighter for the rights of Hispanics in Florida, Osvaldo Soto, passed away last Saturday in Miami at the age of 91, as a result of Parkinson's.

Osvaldo was founder and director, for 27 years, of La Liga Hispanoamericana Contra la Discriminación (SALAD), an organization that emerged to give voice to an emerging and evolving Hispanic population in South Florida and that has fought to eradicate discriminatory practices regarding access to housing, employment, and education in the state.

His activism constituted an important pillar against the English Only resolution, which after the massive arrival of Cubans from the Mariel exodus in 1980, generated a wave of rejection toward Spanish-speaking immigrants in South Florida.

For more than 10 years, Florida prevented the holding of wedding ceremonies in Spanish, as well as the processing of documents and other legal procedures, limiting the life, integration, and access of Cubans to the dynamics of the new society.

Soto will be remembered for his fight against the "English Only" ordinance in effect in Miami-Dade County for all official acts and documents during the 1980s, which he combated, among other ways, by officiating weddings in Spanish in the open air in the Little Havana neighborhood.

A lawyer by training, he shared classrooms at the University of Havana with Fidel Castro, whom he supported to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, although shortly after 1959, disappointed by the direction the revolutionary process was taking, he decided to go into exile in Miami.

Soto also was a member of the Brigada de Asalto 2506, which carried out the failed invasion of Playa Girón in April 1961.

Subsequently, Soto dedicated himself to teaching in the states of Wyoming and Virginia, and was a professor at Iowa State University, before returning to Florida in the mid-1970s and obtaining his law license.

Soto is survived by his wife, Bertila Soto, 82 years old, and his children Bertila Soto, Osvaldo Nestor Soto Jr., Eduardo Soto, and Rick Soto.