Luis Fernández

Fernández died in Miami on the night of 31 October 2026, aged 75. His death was made known by his longtime friends and fellow lawyers Willy Allen and Santiago Alpízar, who told Martí Noticias. Allen called it "a devastating loss". Alpízar wrote on Facebook that he had been "a lawyer for everyone and a patriot". The cause of death and details of his funeral had not been made public at the time of the first reports.

Luis Fernández was born on 23 October 1951 in Sagua la Grande, Villa Clara, Cuba. His father, Luis Fernández-Caubi, was a lawyer who founded the family firm in Cuba in 1949 and was a professor of law at the Universidad Santo Tomás de Villanueva in Havana. The family left Cuba for exile in the United States, and the firm reopened in Miami in 1976.

Fernández studied at Florida Atlantic University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in science, and then at the University of Florida's Fredric G. Levin College of Law. He was admitted to the Florida Bar on 12 April 1979.

For more than four decades Fernández was an experienced trial lawyer in criminal and civil litigation throughout South Florida, working in the family firm, Luis Fernandez, P.A., which became a third-generation practice.

His work was closely tied to the Cuban exile cause. In 1988 the firm played a crucial role in the international campaign that pressured the Cuban government into releasing a large group of political prisoners. He also worked closely on the legal defence of the Movimiento Democracia, the exile organisation led by Ramón Saúl Sánchez, whose immigration status in the United States attracted public attention for years, and he was often asked by Spanish-language media to explain legal questions affecting Cuban migrants.

In 2010 he was one of four Cuban American lawyers in Miami, together with Wilfredo Allen, Ricardo Martínez-Cid and Santiago Alpízar, who founded the Represores ID project. The initiative gathered photographs, videos and testimony to identify agents of Cuban state security and others accused of human rights violations who had arrived in the United States unrecognised, and passed the information to the FBI and US immigration authorities.

Fernández came from a family of lawyers, and the firm founded by his father continued into a third generation. Friends and colleagues described him as a man of integrity and a patriot who was always ready to help. Few other details of his private life have been published.

Fernández is remembered in Miami's Cuban American community as a lawyer whose work reached beyond the courtroom, from the 1988 campaign for the release of political prisoners to the legal support he gave the Movimiento Democracia. The Represores ID project he helped found anticipated later efforts by human rights organisations to identify alleged Cuban repressors living in the United States, which CiberCuba noted remained a priority for many exiles at the time of his death.