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The Cuban scholar Lorenzo Vega-Montoto published this week on the portal of the Center for Studies on the Rule of Law Cuba Próxima an essay on a core issue in opposition circles: the proliferation of parties in the Cuban exile. In his view, this does not strengthen the democratic cause, but rather represents a strategic gift to the regime in Havana.
The text takes as its catalyst the announcement by activist Amelia Calzadilla regarding the founding of the Cuban Orthodox Liberal Party (PLOC) from Madrid on April 27, and uses it as a starting point for an analysis of the historical patterns of opposition fragmentation and their consequences for a potential democratic transition.
Vega-Montoto acknowledges the personal value of Calzadilla —who became known with a viral video in 2022 denouncing the gas shortage in the Cerro municipality and was exiled in Madrid in 2025 after years of repression— but warns that the phenomenon represented by her gesture transcends her individual figure.
"Amelia is a brave woman who paid a real price for her activism, and that moral capital belongs to her without dispute," writes the academic, before noting that the problem is not her but the pattern she embodies.
That pattern, according to Vega-Montoto, has repeated itself over thirty years: the civic leader who finds in partisan politics the next step in their transformative vocation. Eliécer Ávila founded Somos Más after confronting the then-president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón, in a viral video. Antonio Rodiles transitioned from legal activism with the SATS State to political leadership. Yunior García, a playwright and figure of the Archipiélago movement, ended up in exile while trying to articulate a political project beyond cultural denunciation.
The author, a doctor in Chemical Sciences and a Senior Researcher at Idaho National Laboratory, clarifies that multipartyism is not inherently a flaw: “Multipartyism is not a defect of the democratic system; it is its fundamental nutrient.” The problem, he insists, is the timing: “In a transition, programmatic pluralism is the fuel of democracy, but in the phase of combating totalitarianism, premature pluralism is the medicine that turns into poison.”
That context is one of a Cuba that has accumulated six decades of economic failure, an exodus of more than a million people since 2021, blackouts lasting up to twenty hours a day, and inflation that has devastated the savings of entire generations, while the regime controls the army, the judiciary, the media, and access to the internet. The 2019 Constitution also codified the explicit prohibition of any political party other than the Communist Party.
Vega-Montoto analyzes the reaction of the state television program Con Filo —which made a public mockery of Calzadilla following the announcement of the PLOC— not as panic but as a calculation: "The atomization is not their nightmare. It is their strategy."
To support his argument, the scholar refers to the major transitions of the 20th century. In Poland, Solidarity was a heterogeneous coalition that postponed programmatic debate until a democratic system could facilitate it. In Chile, the Concertación brought together Christian democracy and the left to build a common No against Pinochet without agreeing on a model for the country. In Argentina, the Multipartidaria of 1981 united Peronism and radicalism under a minimal program for constitutional restoration. In Spain, opposition parties accepted conditions that none would have freely chosen to make the 1978 Constitution possible.
The argument closest to Cuba, Vega-Montoto points out, does not come from Warsaw or Santiago but from Tampa and Key West: José Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892 not as an ideological party but as a plural coalition with the sole objective of independence. "Martí understood something that his more doctrinaire contemporaries either did not want or could not grasp: that the moment demanded functional unity, not ideological homogeneity."
Using the analytical framework of Markov chains applied to political transitions, Vega-Montoto argues that the probability of a regime fracture leading to democracy—and not chaos or authoritarian regression—depends on the existence of an opposition with sufficient organizational density to fill the power vacuum. This density, he cautions, is precisely what is destroyed each time the opposition becomes fragmented into projects that compete for the same social base.
"The question that they all must ask themselves, and that we as a community must ask ourselves collectively, is not whether we have the right to disagree. It is whether we can afford the luxury of disagreeing right now," the essay concludes.
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