SEBASTIAN ARCOS CAZABON

Support the Varela Project

  •  It was March 1990. In a house in Havana's outskirts, six dissidents found their conversation interrupted by the roar of a helicopter overhead. Minutes later, a mob of ``outraged citizens'' raided the home, knocking down the door and smashing several windows. That's how the Cuban regime crushed the first serious attempt at unification by dissident groups, which then numbered barely half a dozen.
  •  The second attempt, in the early 1990s, was less ephemeral but also failed as a result of intrigue and suspicion planted within and from without. Instead of unifying, it divided the opposition into two ineffectual blocs.
  •  The third attempt -- Concilio Cubano, in 1995 -- was much more serious, and the regime's reaction was so brutal that it left four Cubans dead in the Straits of Florida.
  •  The fourth and latest attempt has just been made, with the endorsement of the Varela Project by more than 100 opposition groups.

    The importance of an opposition-group convergence in Cuba is easy to gauge by looking at the regime's reaction. An coalition would attract international attention and gain legitimacy more effectively than a hundred small groups.

    It's not the international stage that worries the regime most, however, but the domestic scene. An opposition coalition undoubtedly would be more attractive to the Cuban people, who might begin to consider it as a serious alternative to the present regime. That is why the Cuban regime, which has failed to eliminate the opposition, cannot afford the luxury of allowing it to organize and mature.

    Mature is the key word. No political opposition has a chance to succeed if it doesn't come together behind a common strategy, beyond agreement on the final objective. Democracy is the game of consensus from diverse opinions. Consensus is a sign of political maturity, and only the politically mature societies are capable of prospering in freedom.

    We Cubans cannot successfully leap from totalitarianism to democracy without first learning the art of consensus and political coalitions. The Varela Project gives us the perfect opportunity to exercise those virtues.

    The project is also politically astute. By calling for a plebiscite guaranteed by the 1976 Constitution, the Varela Project is legal, moderate and thus almost impossible to disqualify. No one could oppose the idea of submitting the Cuban regime to the people's will through a plebiscite.

    For the opposition, the Varela Project is an ally generator and foe neutralizer, even within the regime itself. For the regime, it's the uncomfortable dilemma of accepting the plebiscite, or admitting that it ignores its own laws.

    Some have criticized the Varela Project as a ``Marxist project'' that legitimizes the Constitution of 1976 and, by inference, the regime. The same could be said about the Chilean case, but there you have the opposition in power and Augusto Pinochet stripped of immunity. No project that promotes individual freedoms can be Marxist, and the promoter of the Varela Project, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, is a legitimate and honorable oppositionist who is no more a Marxist than I'm a Martian.

    No project that promotes individual freedoms
    can be Marxist.
    The Varela Project does not claim to be the perfect solution to the Cuban crisis. It is not a transition project, either, but first step in that direction, an experiment whose consequences are negative only to the regime. That's why it deserves everyone's support, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, regardless of what our favorite strategy might be.

    In the end, politics is the art of the possible, not of our dreams.

    Sebastián Arcos Cazabón is an activist with the Cuban Committee for Human Rights.