DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
Fredo Arias-King

HOST:
Juliana Rabelo


Synopsis:

What does Cuba have to learn from the transitions in Eastern Europe?

Arias King gives us 10 lessons:

1. Don´t confuse freedom with the transition. First there must be a liberation unhijacked by the previous regime and then will come the transition.

2. The leader of the liberation, if they have the will to, can reinvent Cuba. Never use tragic history as a pretext for not reforming.

3. If you are a pacific liberator, you should be prepared to govern Cuba. Power is neutral, it is a tool, in your hands it is moral.

4. The iron rule: success or failure of post-communist transitions can be explained almost exclusively by whether or not who ends up in power after the collapse of communism had positions in the previous system or not. The more old communist nomenklatura participates in the post-communist reality, the worse it is for the country.

5. During the transition, you should not experiment with economic models that have not been proven.

6. There must be defined political parties. During the liberation there exists a coalition of all of the factions that want to survive. After the liberation the parties should define themselves programmatically and compete for the government.

7. An anti-communist social democratic party should be founded to occupy the left since the communist tend to occupy the left and relaunch themselves as social democrats.

8. The more radical of a reformer you are, the more the voter compensates you.

9. Do what you can to change to a presidential or parliamentary system.

10. In liberations, add, in transitions subtract. Do not concentrate on the pre-conditions to reform; however, Cuba is ready according to 9/10 of these pre-conditions. The regime is ten steps ahead preparing for the transition creating a reserve of liquid assets for repression (money, networks and compromising archives). The role of civil society is fundamental.


Bio:

Fredo is the president of the CASLA Institute, a think-tank based in Prague dedicated to the exchange of experiences of transition in Eastern Europe with leaders of change in Latin America, the fight for human rights in the region, in addition to leading the opening of a penal investigation against President Nicolás Maduro at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. CASLA´s project “Faces of Resistence” also produced 80 documentaries profiling Czechoslovakian ex-dissidents and their fight for freedom that culminated in 1989. CASLA was also in charge of organizing in November 1989 various events in the United States, Mexico, Germany, Russia and the Czech Republic for the President Lech Walesa, commemorating 30 years of the liberation of Poland and Central Europe.

He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University in the U.S. In 1992 he founded the academic journal Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, currently published by George Washington University in the U.S.

He holds a master´s in Russian and Eastern European Studies as well as an MBA, both from Harvard.
He has published three books and a variety of materials about transitions in the ex-communist world, and participates (as co-producer and consultant) in the making of a film about Mijail Gorbachov.

Fredo participated in the liberation of Mexico in 2000 as a consultant on the campaign of the PAN party that ended 7 decades of a single-party regime. Fredo together with Dr. Carlos Salazar directed the majority of the international relations of this campaign.

In 2006, Fredo also participated in bringing to Mexico the U.S. consultant Dick Morris, who reverted 15 points of disadvantage of the PAN´s candidate to end with a close (though contested) victory against the left´s candidate.

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