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.
Four excerpts from the Iranian press-on elections and democracy and on religious intolerance and intellectual pluralism-suggest the extent to which democratic thinking has gained a foothold in Iran.
Once again, a reformist electoral victory has been followed by political setbacks. The key to understanding this paradoxical pattern lies in the unique theocratic constitutional structure of the Islamic Republic.
