"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Showing posts with label Carlos Alberto Montaner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carlos Alberto Montaner. Show all posts
“There is a secret family of victims of totalitarianism, which can be
the families in Burma or the victims in North Korea or in Iran or in
Cuba. We feel a special bond with them because we belong to the same
family.” - Carlos Alberto Montaner, (2011)
Carlos Alberto Montaner
One year ago today Carlos Alberto Montaner shuffled off this mortal coil after a long and debilitating illness. The Center for a Free Cuba released the following statement on the same day.
The death of Carlos Alberto Montaner in Spain after a long illness is a great loss for Cubans in the island and around the world who benefited from his tireless efforts to denounce the crimes of the Cuban regime. It is also a loss for millions of people worldwide whose struggle for human rights he defended in his many books, columns, and thousands of articles that appeared in major newspapers on three continents. Carlos Alberto was a champion for the victims of communism and oppression, and he urged the international community to assist them.
The chairman of the Center for a Free Cuba, Guillermo Marmol, stated: “Carlos Alberto Montaner served for many years on the Center’s research council where he made significant contributions to the Center’s policies, publications, and research. We are confident that it will not be long before the extent, significance, and importance of Carlos Alberto Montaner’s life is fully known in Cuba itself.”
The Center for a Free Cuba extends its deepest condolences to Linda, his widow; to Carlos and Gina, his children; and to his family, colleagues and friends.
The life he lived could have been very different, if at age 17 Carlos Alberto had not successfully escaped from an arbitrary detention in 1960, found protection in an Embassy, and months later was able to leave Cuba.
A year later, and the loss of this great man of letters is still felt. Three days ago, Alvaro Vargas Llosa paid homage to Carlos Alberto Montaner and observed that despite having had success in life, following his death his legacy has grown larger, and more impactful.
His writings, and interviews remain even more relevant, and important today.
For example, on April 4, 2007, Helen Aguirre Ferré interviewed Carlos Alberto Montaner on GBH, public television, about communism in Cuba. This analysis is still applicable today, but he had refined his stance by 2014.
Carlos Alberto Montaner contributed an article
to the New York Times published on October 13, 2014 in which he made
the case against normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba. He Tweeted it out one week after President Obama announced the normalization of relations with Cuba.
Below is the article Carlos Alberto Tweeted out ten years ago this December. Time proved him right.
New York Times, October 13, 2014
Cuba Doesn’t Deserve Normal Diplomatic Relations
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
Carlos Alberto Montaner is a Cuban-born author, journalist and syndicated columnist. His work appears in The Miami Herald and other publications throughout Latin America, the United States and Spain. His latest novel is "Tiempo de Canallas." He is on Twitter.
The United States should not normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba for several reasons.
First, the Cuban government has been officially declared “a state sponsor of terrorism" by the State Department. It's inconceivable to oppose the terrorists in the Middle East while treating them normally in the United States' neighborhood.
There's also a bipartisan consensus in Washington against the Castro regime. All three Cuban-American senators and four Cuban-American representatives, Democrats and Republican, agree that sanctions should be maintained. They are the best interpreters of the opinion of the almost three million Cubans and descendants of Cubans living in the United States.
Cuba systematically engages in undermining the interests of the United States. It is an ally of Iran, North Korea (to whom it furnishes war matériel), Russia, Syria, the FARC terrorists in Colombia and Venezuela. The F.B.I. recently warned that Cuban intelligence is trying to recruit people in the academic world as agents of influence. It once infiltrated them into the Pentagon and the State Department; today, they are in prison.
The Cuba dictatorship continues to violate human rights and shows no intention to make amends. The small economic changes it has made are directed at strengthening the regime. Why reward that behavior? During the entire 20th century, the U.S. was (rightfully) reproached for maintaining normal relations with right-wing dictatorships. For the first time, the U.S. maintains a morally consistent position in Latin America and should not sacrifice it.
A reversal of policy would be a cruel blow against the Cuban democrats and dissidents who view the United States as their only dependable ally in the world. Normalizing relations would be the proof needed by the Stalinists in the Cuban government to demonstrate that they don't have to make any political changes to be accepted. Not to mention a premature reconciliation without substantial changes would also be a harsh blow to the reformists in the Cuban government who are pressuring toward a democratic opening.
"When life goes wrong, a wet sponge erases the whole picture."- Cassandra, from Agamemnon by Aiskhylos
Carlos Alberto Montaner (Left) warns of the threat AMLO presents to Mexico
Tonight my concerns for the future of Mexico deepened when a thinker that I greatly admire, Carlos Alberto Montaner, retweeted my tweet and added a cautionary prediction on the July 1, 2018 Presidential election in Mexico. He warned that, "AMLO [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] leads the polls in Mexico. The people commit suicide. Venezuelans and Cubans can attest to that. The Czechoslovaks also committed suicide after the Second World War. They paid with 40 years of communist totalitarianism. Until 1989 they did not breathe freedom again."
AMLO encabeza las encuestas en México. Los pueblos se suicidan. Los venezolanos y los cubanos pueden dar fe de ello. Los checoslovacos también se suicidaron tras la II Guerra mundial. Pagaron con 40 años de totalitarismo comunista. Hasta 1989 no volvieron a respirar libertad. https://t.co/dtyfTxF8AY
Montaner is well informed, wise and his opinion has considerable weight. Amazon provides the following biography on this scholar and defender of freedom which is excerpted below.
Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1943. Has lived in Madrid since 1970. Has
been a university professor in various institutions in Latin America,
the United States and Spain. He is a writer and journalist. Dozens of
newspapers in Latin America, Spain and the United States have published
his weekly column for the past 40 years at least. He has been described
by the magazine ‘Poder’ (‘Power’) as one of the most widely read and
most influential columnists in the Spanish-language world. The number of
readers who have access to his articles every week is estimated at 6
million.
He has participated as an observer at several elections
in Latin America and in numerous seminars devoted to the strengthening
of democracy and the diffusion of the concepts of liberty.
Montaner
received the Tolerance Prize awarded by the Comunidad de Madrid in
2007. In 2010 he was awarded the “Juan de Mariana for a life dedicated
to the defense of freedom”. In 2009 the Universidad Francisco Marroquín
in Guatemala was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa. Previously,
the University of Applied Sciences in Peru (UPC) had appointed him a
Visiting Professor. In 2007, during the democratic government of Enrique
Bolaños, Nicaragua's government gave him the “Orden Rubén Darío”.
Montaner
has published more than 25 books. Several of them have been translated
into English, Portuguese, Russian and Italian. Among the better known
and re-edited titles are Journey to the Heart of Cuba; How and Why
Communism Disappeared; Liberty, the Key to Prosperity, and the novels
Perromundo, A Dog's World, and 1898: The Plot. Some of his most
controversial and most widely distributed essays are the best-sellers
Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot and Manufacturers of Misery,
both co-written with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Álvaro Vargas Llosa. The
Return of the Idiot, also by the three authors, has been published.
Some claim that AMLO is no Hugo Chavez, but like the late Venezuelan despot, Lopez Obrador has distanced himself while following the same playbook and calling for a rewrite of the Mexican constitution. This is what Chavez did in 1998. Chavez even called Fidel Castro a dictator during the campaign, and pledged that he would turn over power prior to his five year term. Five years earlier the Venezuelan president turned dictator had been received in Cuba by Fidel Castro and celebrated as a hero. Let us hope and pray that history does not repeat itself in Mexico.
What the mainstream press is missing in the Cuba policy debate
Seven final warnings about Obama's new Cuba policy By Carlos Alberto Montaner, Cuban academic and author
The first warning is that the government of the Castro brothers
maintains in 2015 exactly the same vision of the United States that it
had when the guerrillas came to power in January 1959.
To them, the huge and powerful neighbor and its purported predatory
practices in the economic field are at the root of mankind's basic
problems.
The second warning, a consequence of the first, is that that
regime, wholly consistent with its beliefs, will continue to try to
affect the United States negatively in all instances that present
themselves.
Yesterday, it placed itself under the Soviet umbrella. In the
post-Soviet era, it built the foundation for the São Paulo Forum and
later for the circuit known as 21st-Century socialism, which extended to
the countries of the so-called ALBA. Today, it allies itself firmly
with Iran and is lining up with the Sino-Russian side in this new and
dangerous Cold War being gestated. To the Castros, anti-Americanism is a
moral crusade that they'll never renounce.
The third one is that the Cuban dictatorship has not the
slightest intention to begin a process of liberalization that might
allow political pluralism or freedoms, as these are known among the
world's most developed nations.
Opposition democrats are tolerated so long as their movements and
communications can be regulated and watched by the political police.
The regime perfectly dominates the techniques of social control. Aside
from the conventional police to keep the opposition in check, it has at
least 60,000 counterintelligence officers under the MININT [Interior
Ministry] and tens of thousands of collaborators. To them, repression is
not a dark and shameful behavior but a constant and patriotic task.
The fourth is that the economic system being erected by Raúl
Castro has not been conceived to nurture a civil society, a society that
someday will magically overthrow the dictatorship. Instead, it is a
model of Military Capitalism of State (MCS), whose backbone consists of
the Army and the Ministry of the Interior, institutions that control
most of the country's productive apparatus.
Within that scheme, as can be surmised from the words of official
economist Juan Triana Cordoví, the State (in reality, the military
sector) reserves for itself the management and exploitation of the
country's 2,500 medium and large businesses, leaving to the
self-employed entrepreneurs a large number of small activities that it
doesn't care to sustain.
Contrary to the thinking in Washington and among the nongovernmental
Cuban sectors that support those economic reforms, Raúl Castro and his
advisers assume, correctly, that the self-employed entrepreneurs will be
a source of stability for the Military Capitalism of State, not because
of ideological affinity but because they don't want to lose the small
privileges and advantages they gain.
The fifth one is that the Castro brothers' regime is not at all
interested in propitiating the enrichment of foreign businessmen. They
despise the capitalists' zest for profiting, which they find repugnant,
although they themselves practice it discreetly, somehow.
Investments from abroad will be welcome only and solely if they
contribute to strengthen the Military Capitalism of State that they are
forging. To the Cuban government, those investments are a necessary
evil, like someone amputating his own arm to save his life.
If anybody thinks that that regime will permit the emergence and growth
of an independent entrepreneurial fabric, it's because he has not taken
the trouble to study the writings and speeches of the officials of the
regime or even to examine their behavior.
Real-estate investor and renowned millionaire Stephen Ross was
absolutely right when, after returning from a trip to Cuba, he declared
that he had not seen on the island the tiniest serious opportunity to do
business. In reality, there is none, except in those activities that
provide a clear profit for the government or those that are absolutely
indispensable for the survival of the regime.
It is obvious that the Castros' priority is to cling to power and not
develop a vigorous entrepreneurial fabric that will bring Cubans out of
misery. To explain their shortfalls, they have created the alibi of
revolutionary austerity and criticism of consumerism (people's
attraction to “junk”) as a heroic and selfless form of confronting
poverty.
The sixth warning is that, in the face of this depressing picture
of abuse and insistence on the usual blunders, Washington's rejection
of containment and its substitution by engagement (plus cancelling the
objective of trying to promote a regime change, as Obama announced in
Panama) is a dangerous and irresponsible hastiness that will harm the
United States, encourage its enemies, dishearten its allies and affect
very negatively the Cuban people, who desire freedoms, real democracy
and an end to their misery.
What's the sense of the United States -- and the Catholic Church --
helping to strengthen a Military Capitalism of State, a foe of freedoms
including economic freedom, a violator of Human Rights that perpetuates
in power a collectivist dictatorship that has destroyed Cuba and today
contributes to destroying Venezuela, because it cannot show anything
other than what it has done for 56 years?
The seventh warning is that the democratic opposition has never
been more fragile and less protected than today, despite the impressive
number of dissidents and the heroism they display. It has never been
more alone.
Why would anyone take that opposition into account when the United
States has renounced regime change and is willing to accept the Cuban
dictatorship without demanding anything in exchange?
The United States has renounced to indicating to Havana clearly that
true change begins at the moment when the top level of the dictatorship
accepts that the first step is to dialogue with the opposition and admit
that societies are pluralistic and harbor differing points of view.
What argument can be wielded now by the silent and always cowed reformists in the regime to ask -- sotto voce -- for political and economic changes from the Castros' government when nobody else demands them?
In sum, Obama has made a serious mistake by separating himself from the
policy followed by the 10 presidents, Democratic and Republican, who
preceded him to the White House.
Nobody can state by decree that his enemy has suddenly turned into his
friend and has begun to think along one's lines. That's childish.
It is not a question of criticizing Obama for having essayed a new policy. The problem is that it is a bad policy.
"Life on earth is a hand-to-hand mortal combat ... between the law of love and the law of hate." - José Martí (1881)
Pedro Luis Boitel Abraham (1931 - 1972)
Pedro Luis Boitel was born in Cuba to a family of modest means of French origin. He studied at the University of Havana while working as a radio technician. Opposing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista he joined the July 26 movement led by Fidel Castro. The majority of the movement's members like Pedro were anti-communists.
As time went on and the dictatorial nature of the Castro regime became more apparent, the student leader became an opponent to Fidel Castro. Condemned to a decade in prison in 1961 he served the cruel and unjust sentence but as the date of his release came and went prison officials refused to free him. In response to the years of cruelty, torture and now denial of his freedom he went on hunger strike on April 3, 1972. Pedro Luis Boitel died forty years ago today on May 25, 1972 after 53 days on hunger strike in Havana in the Castillo del Principe. Academic freedom and autonomy ended in 1960
replaced with fear, repression, and ideological litmus tests to attend
university. It has still not been restored today.
The first time I heard about Pedro Luis Boitel was in the 1987 documentary Nobody Listened. The image and testimony of his mother who looked forward to death to be reunited with her son is heart breaking.
Over the past few days in Geneva there was a review of the current regime in Cuba by the Committee Against Torture. Representatives of the Castro dictatorship made the claim that since 1959 there had been no instances of torture. They say this because, since 1959 theInternational Red Crosshas only been able to obtain access to examine Cuban prisons only once over a small window of time in 1989out of the 53 years the government has been in power. Amnesty Internationalhas not been able to visit Cuba since 1990.
The world knows about Pedro Luis Boitel because his mother, Clara Abrahante Boitel, fought to save her son and make known the atrocities committed against Pedro Luis regardless of the threats visited upon her. The same holds true in the case of Orlando Zapata Tamayo where his mother Reina Luisa Tamayo spoke up for her son in defense of his rights regardless the cost.
However in addition to Pedro Luis Boitel and Orlando Zapata Tamayo the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has documented additional Cuban political prisoners who have died on hunger strike both before and after Pedro Luis Boitel's May 25, 1972 death:
Roberto López Chávez, 25 years old, died on December 11, 1966 in Isla de Pinos prison on hunger strikewithout medical assistance. Armando Valladares, in his prison memoir, Against All Hope described the circumstances surrounding his death: “When Roberto López Chávez, went on a hunger strike to protest the abusesin the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. [...] He died the next day.”
Carmelo Cuadra Hernández, died in La Cabaña prison in April of 1969 on hunger strike, after suffering mistreatment and torture over eight and a half months, without receiving medical care and was the third political prisoner that has died on a hunger strike.
Olegario Charlot Pileta, died in the infamous "Escaleras" (staircase) of the Boniato prison, in of January 1973 during a hunger strike, without medical assistance and is described in documents as a “black youth.”
Enrique García Cuevasdied on a hunger strike, without receiving medical care, in cell No. 4 of the new Provincial Jail of Santa Clara, on June 24, 1973.
Remember Pedro Luis Boitel's life and sacrifice today but also remember that as long as this dictatorship is allowed to operate with impunity that others will continue to suffer the horrors that Pedro Luis Boitel suffered in defense of human rights, dignity and liberty.
Carlos Alberto Montaner, who briefly shared the same prison with Pedro Luis Boitel, speaks about the young man he knew at a May 2011 presentation.
Carlos Alberto Montaner today received and dedicated the "Juan de Mariana Award for an exemplary trajectory in the defense of freedom” to Orlando Zapata Tamayo. Below is the speech translated to English.
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
In 1980, shortly after making a dramatic exit from Cuba, the magnificent writer Reinaldo Arenas collected in a book his more combative articles and essays and titled it The Need for Freedom.
It was a shout. Reinaldo felt the need to be free. Human beings need to be free. He was asphyxiating in Cuba. He lived in sadness, fear and indignation. None of those three emotions is pleasant, and sometimes they twisted in his heart to the point of desperation.
After finding exile, Reinaldo felt profound relief and said something that was both wondrous and painful: for the first time, he had shown his true face. He had “unmasked” himself and felt the warm sensation of being himself, without the fear that such an act might bring him punishment and alienation.
In totalitarian societies, the pain of not being free and moving about in disguise becomes somatic in various ways, from a knot in the throat to a diffuse malaise expressed by assorted neurotic behaviors.
What is freedom? It is the ability we have to make decisions based on our individual beliefs, convictions and interests, without external pressures.
Freedom is choosing the god who best fits our religious perceptions, or choosing no god if we don’t feel the spiritual need to transcend.
Freedom is fearlessly offering our affection and loyalty to the people we love, or to the groups with which we feel a kinship.
Freedom is choosing without interference what we want to study, where and how we wish to live, the ideas that best reflect our vision of the social problems or the ideas that best seem to explain them.
Freedom is selecting the artistic expressions that please us the most, or, conversely, rejecting them without consequences.
Freedom is being able to undertake or renounce an economic activity without reporting to anyone, beyond the formalities established by law.
Freedom is spending our money as we see fit, acquiring the goods that satisfy us and disposing of our legitimate properties. Without freedom, the creation of wealth is weakened to the point of misery.
José Martí, the illustrious journalist who generated Cuba’s independence, contributed another definition: “Freedom is the right of every man to be honest, and to think and speak without hypocrisy.”
Tyrannies deny us the right to be honest when they force us to applaud what we detest or reject what we secretly admire.
When Cubans parade, shouting slogans they don’t believe in, they are not honest. When they applaud the leader they abhor or laugh at the nonsense he spouts, they are not honest.
That simulation creates in us an uncomfortable psychological dissonance. When we sacrifice our honesty, when we renounce our internal consistency to avoid harm or obtain a privilege, we feel “dirty” and internally ashamed. Hypocrisy is a behavior that wounds the person who practices it and repels the person at whom it’s directed.
But there’s more. At some point in the evolutionary process, when human beings abandoned the rule of instinct and began to guide themselves by reason, they discovered the agonizing process of making decisions by constantly shuffling the prevailing moral values, material interests, and psychological impulses.
To make such decisions, it was necessary to become informed. Totalitarian violence tries to prevent people from becoming informed. Why become informed if all the decisions are made by the State and all the truths have already been discovered?
In Cuba, there are numerous police brigades whose task it is to remove parabolic antennas, find satellite phones, confiscate banned books, and deny Internet access to anyone who is minimally independent. I cannot think of a more wretched activity.
When Spanish socialist Fernando de los Ríos asked Lenin when he was going to institute a regime of freedoms in the fledgling Soviet Union, the Bolshevik answered with a question loaded with cynicism: “Freedom for what?”
The answer to that is manifold: freedom to investigate, to generate wealth, to seek happiness, to reaffirm the individual ego in a human tide, all of them tasks that depend on our ability to make decisions.
The history of the West is the history of societies that have progressively expanded the horizons of free people.
Gradually, they took away from the monarchs and the religious and economic oligarchies their exclusive powers to decide in the name of the whole. The poor and the foreigners attained their rights. The same happened with the races considered to be inferior, with the women, with the people who were alienated because of their sexual preferences. Slavery was finally eradicated.
It is possible to narrate the long, historical trek of human beings as the constant adventure of our species in the quest for a gradual increase in the number of people given the right to make their own decisions.
Sometimes, the exercise of that ability assumes heroic proportions. Some weeks ago, Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo decided to die of hunger and thirst to protest against the injustice and abuses of the dictatorship. All he had to defend his dignity as a human being was his life—and he gave it. To him, to his sad memory, with deep emotion, I dedicate these words.
The above text was a speech by the author, upon receiving the “Juan de Mariana Award for an exemplary trajectory in the defense of freedom,” Madrid, Spain, April 30, 2010.
As the 50th anniversary of the arrival of totalitarianism to Cuba draws to a close it seems an appropriate time to reflect on the alternative that has emerged in Cuba: the nonviolent democratic opposition. The following is the presentation made by Carlos Alberto Montaner earlier this year, along with video footage in Spanish from February 3, 2009 and from December 28, 2009. It is a time for reflection in order to prepare for action.
Cuba and the democratic opposition
Carlos Alberto Montaner
Cuba, two perspectives: The European Union and Cubans Association of Ibero-Americans for Freedom Casa de América, Madrid, Feb. 3, 2009
The Association of Ibero-Americans for Freedom, presided by Dr. Antonio Guedes, has asked me to share with you some reflections about the Cuban democratic opposition. I accept the challenge but begin by saying that I cannot speak on behalf of the dozens of organizations that, inside and outside the island, have their points of view and strategies, as befits a complex society with a certain degree of sophistication, although I believe I maintain excellent relations with most of their leaders. Therefore, my opinions should be accepted only as the personal criteria of someone who, for the past several decades, has not ceased to pay attention and give aid to those groups intent on achieving the establishment in Cuba of a pluralistic political regime that respects individual freedoms and human rights.
In any case, this seems to me to be an extremely important topic, given that the Cuban dictatorship, as part of its strategy of immobility, insists on picturing the opposition as a pitiful gang of fascists at the service of the United States, for the purpose of demonstrating that there is no better option to the communist government and that the Cubans on the island do not want it. Such statements run headlong against reality. The truth is that, within the democratic opposition, one can find all the factors of knowledge, moderation and common sense that will contribute very constructively to the transition to freedom.
The revolutionary tradition An inevitable observation ab initio is that the experience of half a century of communist dictatorship has totally changed the political behavior of the Cuban opposition. During the 57 years of our short republican experience, from the establishment of an independent state in 1902 until the collapse of the Batista dictatorship on Jan. 1, 1959, Cubans resorted to violence to solve their political crises or impose the will of the caudillos. This pushed us into abortive civil wars in 1906, 1912 and 1917, to the revolution of 1933, the military coup of 1952, and finally to the triumph of the revolution in 1959, with Fidel Castro as the country's "Maximum Leader," a title with which he was unctuously baptized at the time.
That tradition of violence continued during the early years of Castroism, when the opposition, through inertia and habit, attempted to halt the enthronement of the communist dictatorship by resorting to the conventional means of struggle that society used to practice and with which it had just liquidated Batista: armed landings, such as the one at Bay of Pigs in 1961; guerrilla uprisings, such as those on the Escambray mountain range (1961 to 1966); military conspiracies, sabotage and terrorist acts. None of this was surprising for the Cubans, given that a good many leaders of the struggle against communism were veterans of the war against Batista: Huber Matos, Manuel Artime, Humberto Sorí Marín, Manuel Ray, David Salvador, Porfirio Remberto Ramírez, Aldo Vera and a very long etcetera [2] that might include dozens of notable personalities who directed the early confrontations against Castroism.
This violent effort to forcibly replace the dominant elite (which, it must be said, left absolutely no space for civic struggle) lasted until approximately 1966, when the last foci of peasant guerrillas on the central mountains were exterminated. During that period, the government efficiently mounted an enormous repressive apparatus, a carbon copy of the Soviet model, which made it practically impossible for its enemies to turn to armed resistance for the purpose of overthrowing it.
A change in vision and behavior During the following decade, under the distant influence of the civil-rights struggle in the United States and the peaceful resistance of dissidents in communist Europe, a slow ideological and strategic evolution began in the ranks of the Cuban democratic opposition, which came to a notable turning point: the rise to power in Washington of President Jimmy Carter and his defense of human rights as the banner of U.S. foreign policy, in the spirit of the Helsinki Accords signed in the mid-1970s.
That pacifist and rational atmosphere, which rejected violence and vindicated democratic methods, led some oppositionists to realize that perhaps it was a historic error for Cubans to resort to force to try to solve their political crises. It might have been more sensible, they thought, to follow the road of negotiation and the search for mechanisms of consensus that might save the institutions from the shoals without the need to periodically topple the republican structures.
Finally, in 1976, half a dozen Cuban oppositionists with leftist backgrounds were summoned by professor Ricardo Bofill [3] and founded in Havana the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, the first political organization in the nation's history to expressly renounce violence as a method of struggle. The group decided to abide by the rule of law to reclaim the rights quashed by the dictatorship. Meanwhile, in exile in Washington, about the same time, Mrs. Elena Mederos, former minister in the revolutionary government, and activist and politologist Frank Calzón, founded Of Human Rights with the same objective: to defend, by peaceful and legal means, persecuted individuals, dissidents and political prisoners in Cuba.
That aggiornamento of the Cuban democratic opposition, which put it in step with the major civic-struggle movements that existed worldwide, had as a corollary another predictable evolution: the opposition began to move closer to the paradigms and political discourses of the main ideological currents that spread through the contemporary world, somehow evading the autochthonous political roots and the harmful dichotomy of "revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries."
Precisely in Madrid in 1990, a few short months after the toppling of the Berlin Wall, three political groups of exiles with some internal ramifications, steeped in a civic spirit and internationally linked to their respective party families, created the Cuban Democratic Platform [4] to try to propitiate a peaceful change to democracy. Shortly thereafter, this new ideological vision of political struggle began to propagate inside the island.
An opposition similar to that in the rest of democratic world In fact, the Cubans who today live in Cuba or abroad, display all the ideological hues that one might find in the parliaments of any Western country, except that the Cubans on the island must endure the constant harassment of the political police, while the exiles can defend their ideas without any fear. Roughly speaking, the current opposition has an abundance of Christian democrats, social democrats, liberals and conservatives. There are Green oppositionists, who are very concerned by the environmental destruction seen in their country; there are oppositionists who are deeply committed to the protection of respect for human rights, and there are union-minded oppositionists who vindicate the rights granted to workers.
Which of these tendencies is the most powerful? It may be futile to speculate on this issue. More than true political parties, what exists inside and outside Cuba are currents of opinion and some small structural streams that will eventually evolve into true, multitudinous political formations. In addition, these tendencies have effected a certain international linkage with similar parties and ideological institutions, the so-called "internationals," which helps develop clear ideological paradigms and public-policy recipes that are perfectly reasonable. All this will somehow guarantee the foreseeable evolution of post-Castroism.
This observation is very interesting because it belies the theory that the end of the communist dictatorship will lead to great political and economic chaos. That's not true. Most probably, the same theoretical schemes we saw in the countries that abandoned communism in eastern Europe will be reproduced in Cuba. The lectures and debates so common among opposition democrats point in that direction: they not only want to spur the end of communism but also have a very clear idea of the direction in which the country should move in a peaceful manner. Practically all of them think of a political model characterized by pluralism, tolerance, alternation in power, and subordination to the rules. What has disappeared from the Cubans' ideological mindset are veneration for caudillos and the cult of revolution.
The frozen regime Lamentably, the healthy evolution undergone by the democratic opposition is not present in the behavior of the dictatorship. Over and again, the government of the Castro brothers reiterates the hard line of the early days of the revolution, as if the world had become frozen in the schemes of the Cold War. As far as the ruling cupola is concerned, the Berlin Wall was never toppled, Marxism-Leninism remains in effect, and the entire propaganda efforts of its huge disinformation machine (endowed with the obscene language of the rankest Stalinist lineage) insists on picturing the democratic opposition as an artificial appendix created by the United States, and opposition leaders as "the Miami mafia," composed of terrorist gangs in the service of the CIA.
Nevertheless, there is very clear evidence that, under the surface, the attitude that really prevails among government supporters, many of them in the ruling class, totally diverges from the official line. In this regard, the recent statements made by singer-composer Pablo Milanés [5] to a Spanish newspaper, as interpreted by the finest experts in the intricacies of Cuban society and the doublespeak used in Cuba, [6] constitute a lot more than an isolated opinion; they represent the point of view of a huge majority of the Cuban Communist Party, whose most important segment acknowledges -- to varying degrees -- what we might call a "willingness to reform." Among many of them, that attitude does not exclude political pluralism and an end to Marxist-Leninist collectivism, as shown by a survey [7] done last November by the party at the University of Havana, but never published. The survey revealed that only 8 percent of all professors and barely 22 percent of the students espouse the orthodox point of view propounded by Fidel and Raúl Castro.
The end of an era How will the Cuban dictatorship end? Probably the way it happened in several countries that managed to orderly bury their old and obsolete dictatorships: through a reform inside the very structure of power, a reform that quickly and gradually will broaden the channels of societal participation, until the old regime is peacefully dismantled through various democratic procedures. That's what happened in Spain, Hungary, Poland and most communist countries in eastern Europe. There is a high probability that something similar will occur in Cuba.
When? The first step will be the burial of Fidel Castro, the true obstacle to any symptom of sensibility and common sense. The second will come with the enactment of the reformist moves that will presumably be advocated by Raúl Castro at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, scheduled for the second half of 2009. [8] The third will come when the democratic opposition can begin to act with greater freedom inside the country. From that time on, it is very likely that events will precipitate in ways that today are unpredictable but that will eventually fling the dictatorship into the dustbin of history. What seems unquestionable is the fact that Cuba can no longer remain a Marxist-Leninist exception in an era when that option was totally forsaken as a consequence of its errors, abuses and legendary unproductivity.
The same, or something very similar, will happen in Cuba. And when we do a balance sheet on the effects of this nigh-eternal nightmare, we might come to the conclusion that so much sacrifice has brought us an unexpected gain: we Cubans have learned that revolutionary violence, caudillism and intolerance always lead to the worst of all possible fates. Fortunately, the time to rectify these nefarious behaviors is close at hand.
NOTES
1. Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer and journalist. He is president of the Cuban Liberal Union and vice president of the Liberal International. He has published some 25 books and hundreds of articles. His latest title, released in 2008, is “Cuba: The battle of ideas.”
2. Dr. Huber Matos (teacher and commander in the Sierra Maestra campaign); Dr. Manuel Artime (physician and lieutenant in Sierra Maestra; later, civilian chief of the Brigade 2506 expeditionists who landed in Bay of Pigs); Humberto Sorí Marín (lawyer and commander in Sierra Maestra, author of the text of the first agrarian reform carried out by the revolution; he was executed by firing squad in April 1961); Manuel Ray (engineer and Minister of Public Works in the first revolutionary Cabinet; chief of Civic Resistance, an organization in the service of the 26 July Movement; later, creator of the People’s Revolutionary Movement, which opposed communist dictatorship); David Salvador (labor leader of the 26 July Movement and, after the triumph of the revolution, Secretary General of the Federation of Cuban Workers; when he turned against communism, he created the 30 November Movement); Porfirio Ramírez (student leader and captain in the rebel army during the struggle against Batista; he led the Federation of University Students in Las Villas before being executed by the government in 1960); Aldo Vera Serafín (police commander in Havana after the triumph of the revolution; former chief of Action and Sabotage in Havana. He was assassinated in Puerto Rico in 1976 by the Cuban intelligence services.)
3. Bofill had been a member of the Communist Party but had landed in prison after a trial called “the microfraction,” accused of conspiring to limit the authority of Castro supporters. The other five members were Adolfo Rivero Caro, Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz, Edmigio López Castillo, Enrique Hernández Méndez and Dr. Marta Frayde. A short while later, the group was joined by brothers Gustavo and Sebastián Arcos, prestigious figures in the struggle against Batista. All of them were sentenced to long prison terms.
4. The three political groups that formed the Cuban Democratic Platform were the Christian Democratic Party (linked to the Christian Democratic International), represented by its president, José Ignacio Rasco; the Social Democratic Coordinator (with some incipient links to the Socialist International), represented by Enrique Baloyra; and the Cuban Liberal Union, a member of the Liberal International, headed by Carlos Alberto Montaner. Other, non-political groups were also present at the event.
5. See Público.es, Dec. 29, 2008, (http://www.publico.es/culturas/186756/socialismo/cubano/estancado), an interview done by journalist Carlos Fuentes. In it, Pablo Milanés not only criticizes the government openly but also declares his total mistrust of the gerontocracy that rules the country.
6. A few months after Milanés’ statements, the so-called “war of the e-mails” broke out. A group of writers and artists who belonged to the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) utilized the Internet to harshly reproach two former functionaries in the culture sector – Luis Pavón and Jorge “Papito” Serguera – for their cruelly repressive acts during the so-called “Gray Quinquennium” in the first half of the 1970s. In reality, the rebuke was a shot fired in the air to complain about the current situation without running great risk, because the desire for deep changes felt by the intellectuals is practically unanimous.
7. The results of the survey remain unpublished but have been learned abroad thanks to the cooperation of European embassies accredited in Havana. As interesting as the overwhelming number of reformers who express their disconformity with the system is the fact that most of them are not satisfied with reforming the regime -- they believe in the need for a radical change in the system.
8. In the extended discussions prior to that long-awaited Congress (the last one was held in 1997 and culminated in enormous frustration), the criticism against the government and the clumsiness of the public administration has been copious and has been heard throughout the island.
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