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vindicate it among those who try to
participate in the transition process is
the simple fact that knowing transition
in general serves as key guidance for
making a transition at the given time
and place. What and how much we
know makes a difference, including
knowing the role of pure chance.
The relationship between knowledge
and the making of political processes is
more elusive, since the differences
between diverse transitions are so
significant that they tend to disfigure
their common traits. Thusly, they pave
the way for experimenting with the will,
refusing to consult models for changes,
and attempting to use any last-minute
model amid the despair over the failure.
Knowing how to transit is critical. From
any perspective, we can never get rid of
some portion of the knowledge about
the past, the present or the future —
what
we
call
prospectively
knowledge— while working for
democratic changes.
The problem is the starting point: the
transition itself contains the recognition
that changes never occur in vacuum. All
previous and present realities from
which we start to see, analyze or
produce the transition is the result of
knowledge. There is a knowledge of
reality, but reality itself is accumulated
knowledge and we try to act based on it.
One must know the reality to transform
it. For Cubans, this is even more true
today.
Whether we face it or not, while
embarking on democratic changes we
have a reference codified in the texts we
have read or to which we have
approached or on which the options of
change receiving external support have
been built.
The key idea of rapid change, an instant
or complete transition, or the
revolutionary overthrow of a regime,
has been fed more with code words than
with a serious attempt to read, study and
analyze the options through reference
texts or concepts. We have oscillated

between the model of transition in the
former socialist bloc and the Cuban
revolutionary model, built on the epic
reading and the fragmented memory of
our history. In both cases, consciously
or not, we have tried to make a
transition from a knowledge made by or
for us. It will be of little help trying to
divide the waters between those who
encourage knowledge of transition and
those who work and struggle for
transition regardless of knowledge.
Such a distinction is accurate in a sense,
but it distorts reality in another sense.
Among those working for change, the
question must be: Can we get rid of
knowledge about transition? The
experience recommends that we should
not try to do it. As the British economist
John Maynard Keynes would say, by
trying to get away from the ideas we
always succumb to the ideas of the past,
the ideas of those who thought before us
the circumstances in which we live. In
our help, there is a text that I find
essential. I recommend it to everyone,
leaders or not, who fight for democratic
changes in Cuba.
Democratic Transitions: Conversations
with World Leaders
This book was prepared and edited by
former Chilean Senator Sergio Bitar and
American
Professor
Abraham
Lowenthal. It was published by Johns
Hopkins University Press in 2015. A
preliminary essay by the authors: From
Authoritarian Rule to Democratic
Governance: Learning from Political
Leaders, was released that same year by
the
International
Institute
for
Democracy and Electoral Assistance
(IDEA) in Sweden.
The book is not only essential, but also
shocking. It moves between pure
academia —with the typical conceptual
analysis of variables and long
developments of inevitably dense texts
running from abstraction to empirical
contrast— and the living vivid
experience of those who built their

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