IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 8 ENGLISH | Page 79

Europe was launched in the 1970s. Isn’t
it necessary then to draw inspiration
from here in order to achieve in the
today’s negations with the communist
government of Cuba the desired results?
Should not the governments of the United States and the EU insist that the
Cuban state must not only honor its
international obligations in the area of
human rights if the negotiations are to
move forward in the spirit of cooperation, but stop using the concept of state
sovereignty in a way which is obsolete
and out of step of current international
law - recognizing as its emerging norms
the concepts of “democratic entitlement”
and “democratic legitimacy”? Should
not they insist that any progress in negotiation can be made only after Cuba
accepts the notion that the state sovereignty is not absolute or unconditional,
because “Governments instituted among
Men”, as American Declaration of Independence phrased it, derive their just
power from the consent of the governed”? That the state sovereignty is
always secondary and contingent to the
sovereignty belonging to the people?
Shouldn’t they insist that the independent voices of civil society must be also
allowed - in an appropriate way - to
participate in the process of “rapprochement” and turned into an indispensable “third” party to the agreement
which will also be in charge of its implementation? When in 1975, the Final
Act of the Conference on Security and
Co-operation in Europe was signed,
there were also many skeptical voices,
especially in the United States, that this

deal between the East and West to secure the peaceful co-existence of states
with “different social and political systems” was a victory of the Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev and the ultimate confirmation of the status quo which was
established in Europe as the result of the
Second World War. But just the opposite
turned out to be true. The third basket of
the Helsinki Accords, however, opened
the space for Czechoslovak Charter 77,
The Polish KOR and later Solidarnosz,
for the Helsinki Committees and other
similar bodies emerging first in the
Soviet Union itself and later throughout
the whole region. It was the Western
diplomats who sought and managed to
secure for these civic initiatives, sometimes after a very hard fight, at least
some level of international recognition.
And it was this recognition what empowered them also domestically; what
not only created a kind of protective
shield against the excessive persecutions
of their participants, but opened the way
to the miraculous year of 1989 with its
wave of peaceful and democratic revolutions which changed radically the political face of the whole region. The diplomatic processes taking place around
Cuba today call for exactly for the same
strategy. The Cuban democratic opposition seems to be aware of it and there are
multiple encouraging signs that that they
are ready to step out internationally as a
coherent enough and sufficiently organized body able to communicate effectively with its international partners; to
present to them their own version of
transition in Cuba; to comment on the

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