In an exchange of letters, leading Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya, founder of the Varela Project and recipient of the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, discusses with Vaclav Havel the lessons that the Czechoslovak postcommunist experience offers to Cubans who aspire to see in Cuba a nonviolent end to the tyrannical communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro and then a transition to democracy.
About the Authors
Václav Havel
Václav Havel, a playwright and one of Europe’s most prominent moral and intellectual figures, was a leading dissident during the period of communist rule. He was elected as the first president of postcommunist Czechoslovakia, and later served as president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. From April to June of 2005, he occupied the Kluge Chair for Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Oswaldo Payá is founder of the Varela Project, a Cuban prodemocracy movment, and the 2002 recipient of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. His letter was translated from the Spanish by Fernando Ruiz.
The recent protests in Russia raise the question of whether the Putin regime could fall to a “color” or electoral revolution like those that have ousted other autocratic regimes in…
Morocco is a country with a "defused" political game: Elections do not play their usual role in democracies of allowing citizens to choose among competing agendas for policy and governance.
Although the transfer of power from Fidel to Raúl has been relatively uneventful, potential divisions within the ruling elite, especially between the military and the Party, are likely to emerge…
