Cuba's Transition After Castro: Cuban-American Views – How Best to Advance Change in Cuba?

Transcript

CARLOS PASCUAL: Why this focus on Cuba? Really, two reasons: The first is that whether it is weeks, or months, or years away, Fidel Castro will pass away, and that will create an opportunity for the most significant change in Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations since Fidel Castro came into power in January of 1959. If one's goal is a free and democratic Cuba, one cannot assume that that change is guaranteed after Fidel leaves. The Cuban people will ultimately, and should, ultimately drive and design their own future.

For us to be able to support that, it is important for us to understand the dynamics of change that can take place within the government of Cuba, its military, the intelligence services, the general population, the Afro-Cuban community, the youth. It is among those points of power, those parts of the population that we will see the pushes and the pulls on how Cuba will transform itself.

We have to be realistic about the incentives and the self-interests of Cuba's future leaders as well. Inevitably, they will want to maintain power, and what are the right policy tools to respond to a situation like that? What we do know from history is that it would have been a mistake to have the same policy toward Mikhail Gorbachev's Russia, Soviet Union, as we did toward Brezhnev. Indeed, we could have missed an opportunity of historic proportion. And it's in that spirit of understanding what the right and most constructive policies might be that we are having this conference, and we look forward to being able to put forward a report on the conference results.

The second reason for this focus on Cuba has to be the political drivers of policy, and on Cuba the politics of policy have been focused in the Cuban-American community. And today we are particularly fortunate through this panel to have the benefit of an outstanding and totally recent poll completed at the beginning of last week by Florida International University. And we will focus on some of the trends and dynamics highlighted in that poll right now.

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