Discussing the Chilean Transition

Discussing the Chilean Transition / 14ymedio
Posted on July 5, 2015

14ymedio, Madrid, 4 July 2015 — In the halls of the Casa de America in
Madrid on Thursday and Friday of this week a training event for Cuban
activists was held. Organized by the Association of Ibero-American
Freedom (AIL), the meeting was attended by ten Cubans from the island as
well as the former Minister General Secretariat of the Presidency of
Chile, the economist Cristian Larroulet and Carlos Alberto Montaner,
among other analysts and intellectuals.

Discussions revolved around the issue of transition, with reference to
what happened in Chile with the ouster of Augusto Pinochet and the
restoration of democracy. Larroulet delved into the conditions that gave
way to the referendum in his country in October 1988, during the
military regime. His words also focused on the need to seek consensus,
the question of post-transitional justice and the delicate issue of
negotiating with the powers that be.

Dagoberto Valdes, director of the magazine Convivencia , Eliecer Avila,
leader of the Movement Somos +, and Laritza Diversent, from the legal
group Cubalex , were among the Cuban activists who participated in these
closed-door discussions.

During closing of the meeting the Chilean writer Roberto Ampuero
discussed his experiences; Ampuero lived in Havana from 1974-1979, where
he renounced the Communist Youth after being disappointed by that
ideology. He subsequently published the book Nuestros años de verde
olivo (Our olive-green years), an autobiographical novel about those
years, whose references were also a topic of conversation among those
present at the event.

The Chilean Mauricio Rojas was a guest at the close of the event, in his
youth Rojas was a member of the Revolutionary Leftist Movement, and
subsequently went into exile in Sweden where he was a Liberal Party
member of parliament. His testimony touched on the process of moving
from extreme political positions to coexistence, negotiation, and
governance by coalitions.

This meeting was in addition to two earlier events, in July and March of
2015, which discussed, respectively, the transition in Spain and the
creation of the Democratic Unity Roundtable in Venezuela (MUD).

Source: Discussing the Chilean Transition / 14ymedio | Translating Cuba
- http://translatingcuba.com/discussing-the-chilean-transition-14ymedio/