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The Cuban academic 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 starting point the announcement by the activist Amelia Calzadilla regarding the founding of the Cuban Orthodox Liberal Party (PLOC) from Madrid on April 27, and uses it as a launchpad 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 that she embodies.
That pattern, according to Vega-Montoto, has been repeated for thirty years: the civic leader who finds in partisan politics the next step in their transformative vocation. Eliécer Ávila founded Somos Más after confronting 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 face of the Archipiélago movement, ended up in exile attempting to articulate a political project beyond cultural denunciation.
The author, a PhD in Chemical Sciences and a Senior Researcher at Idaho National Laboratory, clarifies that multipartyism is not in itself a flaw: "Multipartyism is not a defect of the democratic system; it is its fundamental nutrient." The issue, 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 one 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 military, 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 —that publicly mocked Calzadilla after the announcement of the PLOC— not as panic but as calculation: “Fragmentation is not their nightmare. It is their strategy.”
To support his argument, the scholar reviews the major transitions of the 20th century. In Poland, Solidarność was a heterogeneous coalition that postponed programmatic debate until a democratic system capable of addressing it could be established. In Chile, the Concertación brought together Christian democracy and the left to build a common No against Pinochet without agreeing on a national model. 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 understand: that the moment required 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 —rather than chaos or authoritarian regression— hinges on the presence of an opposition with sufficient organizational density to fill the power vacuum. This density, he warns, is precisely what is destroyed every time the opposition becomes atomized in projects competing for the same social base.
"The question that they all should ask themselves, and that we as a community should collectively ask ourselves, is not whether we have the right to disagree. It is whether we can afford the luxury of disagreeing now," concludes the essay.
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