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Cuban National Reconciliation

Cuban National Reconciliation is an unusual report. It looks at a democratic Cuba not yet in sight and raises some issues the country will surely face. What should be done with a legacy of human rights violations once the transition process has begun? The democracies founded since the 1970s have grappled with this question in different ways, and for many, the answer has been to establish a truth commission. Their efforts to come to terms with the past shed light on three central facets of the process: recovering silenced or absent memories, identifying the truth about what happened, and searching for justice. It is, moreover, important to highlight the inconclusive and, in many cases, the painfully insufficient character of democratization and reconciliation in new democracies. Still, democracy —the only political system founded on the rights of citizens to dissent through their own autonomous means without fear of government reprisals— may be expanded, deepened, and reformed. In that sense, the new democracies could not be more different from the dictatorial regimes that preceded them: democracy is nourished by an ethics of means and universal rights, while dictatorships impose absolute ends.

The Task Force on Memory, Truth and Justice deemed it necessary to imagine a democratic Cuba —the only one capable of consolidating national reconciliation— and to reflect on these themes in the hopes of helping those Cubans who will eventually carry out the transition on the island. We make two main recommendations: first, that a dialogue —among all Cubans and with all those interested in Cuba— be held regarding the Cuban civic reunion and, second, that Cubans seek the means to recover our historical memory as a central element of that reunion, which must necessarily be peaceful, inclusive, and democratic.