Gutenberg Martinez Ocamica, former President of Chile’s’ Chamber of Deputies and, until 2006, President of the Christian Democratic Organization of America, asserts in his “Manual de la perfecta transición latinoamericana” that nothing scares a dictator more than an opposition thinking about the future. He echoes Václac Havel’s’ exhortation to: think the future” and presents ten conditions for a successful transition in light of the Chilean experience.
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Sadly, most of the requirements in Martinez Ocamica’s’ formulation of the “perfect Latin-American transition” are absent in Cuba today. He postulates, for example, that to prepare and carry out a successful transition, a united opposition is required; an opposition that can project the image of being a powerful alternative to the existing government.
For Martinez Ocamica the opposition must in fact constitute and be perceived as a viable and likely governing alternative. He believes that the opposition will be a choice when Cuban colonels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) perceive that their opportunity to become generals will depend on the opposition governing in a democratic milieu. This presupposes accords built on gestures of flexibility; a consensus centered on freedom, and on improving the wellbeing of the citizenry. Yet, these gestures of political flexibility, accommodation, and concern with the wellbeing of the Cuban people are not forthcoming from the Castro government.
In other words, it is not enough for the opposition to fight against oppression, it is also necessary for it to be viewed as a viable alternative offering honest, capable, and judicious governance. He argues that an opposition that knows and articulates how it wants to govern facilitates a transition by removing uncertainty and reducing the level of anxiety and fear of the unknown in the population.
Similarly, an opposition perceived as a responsible governing alternative must offer a program with respect to the human rights abuses of the Castro regime. Every peaceful transition faces this thorny dilemma. Revanchist agendas do not promote a transition process, but justice is a necessary condition to build a law-based state and truth must prevail. This is a topic where the opposition must exercise wisdom, prudence, courage, and heroic tolerance to harmonize ethical values with what is possible and necessary for a national reconciliation.
In my book, Mañana in Cuba, I argue that “what is past is prologue,” and Castroism will not end with the demise of the Castro brothers who will bequeath Cubans a decadent politico-economic system and an inheritance of a civil society unprepared for the demands of a liberal democracy and a competitive market economy.
A most pernicious legacy of Cuban history, exacerbated by Castroism, is that Cuban civil society has not learned to appreciate the vicissitudes of democratic governance and holds on to a historical belief in violence as a legitimate means to achieve political objectives. In the Cuban political mindset, messianic leadership trumps democratic institutions every time.
These conditions present a very difficult challenge for transition planning. Yet, this is precisely the first point in Martinez Ocamica’s’ thesis; transitions must be configured beforehand along a peaceful and democratic path. It is not possible or helpful to conceive of the path from totalitarianism to democracy as made up of discrete, unrelated stages.
The Cuban opposition (both in and out of the island) is an opposition that does not come close to meeting Martinez Ocamica’s’ requirements of unity, and projected strength, and of being in a position to offer a cohesive politico-economic viable alternative to Castroism. How then does the Cuban opposition prepare a successful transition?
A required step is to acknowledge fully that a transition must be responsive to the interests and aspirations of the citizenry, and that in a system that denies basic freedoms, society is debilitated and corrupted by a miasma of fear. At the epicenter of these aspirations are the basic freedoms all humans desire, in particular: freedom from fear.
For five decades, fear has been an integral part of the everyday Cuban existence. The political apathy and paucity of civic values exhibited by today’s’ Cuban society may be viewed as a most sinister form of fear. It is a fear that, masquerading as common sense, condemns as foolish, reckless, or futile, the small daily acts of courage of Cuban dissidents. It is a fear that must be conquered if any national project of transition is to stand a chance of success.
Initiatives that leave fear in place and seek primarily to alter official policies and mechanisms to improve economic and material conditions have little chance of sustained success. Democracy is, at its core, a political system that proposes to empower individuals. Thus, freedom from fear is the first step for a genuine and successful Cuban transition; and because it is a necessary condition to reversing political apathy, it is both a means and an end.
The Cuban opposition today, furthermore, does not enjoy the national recognition and prestige that the Chilean opposition enjoyed, nor does it possess its organizational infrastructure. Cuba’s’ failed and bankrupted centrally planned economy is not the vibrant free-market Chilean economy at work when that country’s’ transition itinerary was established. All of this leads to a Cuban transition that may have to originate with the governing class or an unlikely massive social explosion. A genuine Cuban transition thus will have to wait until the Castro brothers are no longer at the podium; it will be one in which the opposition will have to improvise creatively to gain a measure of stature to play a role.
The perfect Cuban transition is one that proceeds lawfully and peacefully, from law to law. Staying within the realm of the possible, it is one in which the governing class itself decides to change the rules of the game and open the political process calling for free, fair, and competitive elections for a new parliament that will draft a new constitution along the lines of the Spanish transition. This is how the Cuban opposition must think Cuba’s’ future.
But a negotiated, top-down transition led by government officials begs the question: How does an unarticulated Cuban opposition persuade the post-Castro governing class to undertake reforms that may very well result in their loss of political power?
Modern principles of behavioral economics and choice architecture may be used to “nudge” the citizenry to embrace the civic values required for effective democratic governance. The same scientific principles may be creatively employed by the opposition to induce a reluctant post-Castro government to abandon its status quo bias and undertake rapid political reforms to dismantle the communist institutions. A new generation of Cuban leaders will eventually assume power. To be sure, they may be continuity minded, but unlike the Castros, they will be nudgable.”
Those military officials hoping to govern in the first post-Castro interregnum will inherit not only a bankrupt economy, but also paralyzed, dysfunctional institutions, a discredited ideology, a disenchanted society, myriad social problems, and more. They may be able to exert military control, but economically and socially, Cuba will be close to meeting the technical definition of a failed state. A failed state is, by definition, one that can no longer reproduce the conditions for its own existence.
These officials will become heirs to a dangerous, unstable situation which they are unlikely to be able to control. With questionable legitimacy and a repressive apparatus that may be in disarray (and charisma not at the level of Fidel Castro’s) they will have to confront significant internal and external opposition. Their fan of options to cool this hot, enclosed environment will be very limited.
Like Odysseus, these officials will encounter the inescapable threats of their own sea monsters – Scylla and Charybdis – as they look to navigate between opposite sides of the ideological strait; and like Odysseus, they will need to choose which monster to confront. They can stay the totalitarian course and face the Charybdis monster of catastrophic loss with the potential unfolding of uncontrollable events culminating in a Ceausescu-like outcome. Or, they can elect to become leaders of a democratic political opening and confront, on the other side, the more manageable political losses of Scylla. They are intimately familiar with the brutal purging methods of totalitarian regimes and will realize that, for them, long-lasting personal happiness and prosperity can best be attained in a democratic environment even if it means giving up some political power.
Preparing for a successful transition – that is, configuring beforehand a peaceful path to democratic governance – means discerning that the opportunity will arise only when the Castros are gone, and developing a choice architecture strategy to nudge those that will govern in the direction of democratic governance.
In practical terms this means the opposition needs to contest any initiative that may prolong the politico-economic life of the Castros regime. It must also position itself to orchestrate and facilitate an extraordinary package of international assistance to be made available, upon request, to a Cuban government prepared to undertake a genuine transition to democratic governance and free-market economic opportunities for all Cubans. Such a package means nothing to the Castros, but will be extremely popular with the Cuban people seeking to extricate themselves from six decades of totalitarian repression and hardships. In this way, the opposition can legitimately present itself to the Cuban people as a viable and powerful alternative to the Castro government. It is a way of meeting, by proxy, the conditions outlined by Martinez Ocamica.
It is important to highlight that this is not a typical “carrot and stick” formulation designed to induce a change in the leaderships’’ behavior. No change is sought and absolutely no carrots or inducements are offered to the Castros or to any successor regime interested in maintaining the status quo. U.S. initiatives to assist any continuity-minded regime may very well undermine the opportunity to nudge a successor regime honestly interested in democratic change. This formulation explicitly recognizes that the opportunity will arise only when the Castros perverse logic of intransigence is gone. There is no stick either, only a conscious and very public DNR order - Do Not Resuscitate.
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This article was originally published in English in the Miami Herald and in Spanish in El Nuevo Herald.
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