Walesa on Cuba

Former Polish President Lech Walesa spoke about Cuba at an event in Warsaw this week and was quoted by EFE saying that “Cuba will be free sooner or later” and lamenting that “Cubans are so divided that is it very difficult to do anything.”

He was interviewed last March by Diario de Cuba and spoke in more detail:

“Castro and his regime surprise me enormously: the foundations have fallen, the bases of the communist system, and in spite of the proximity to the United States, the regime lives on. I’m ashamed that the free world doesn’t know how to get out of this anachronism. However, the fundamental task is in the hands of the Cubans themselves. The only thing that the free world can do is to support the transition; it cannot replace the Cubans in their responsibility. Which is to say that I don’t much like the work that the Cubans are doing.

[…]

“What would be needed is some movement similar to Solidarity, although it would be of another type. Cubans are too individualistic. Too many have gone into exile, and that has weakened the movement. What’s more, the regime is intelligent. It knows how to deal with the opposition, how to divide society. And division is what one perceives. Division and scarcity of dissidents.”