- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
- Click here to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
- Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)
Editor's Note: Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer and political analyst at CNN. His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America. Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International.
(CNN Spanish) - I must do what in English they call a "full disclosure", a total disclosure. I am a Cuban exile, a condition that inevitably qualifies this comment.
This November marks 500 years since the foundation of Havana. When I left Cuba in September 1961, it was one of the most beautiful and harmonious cities on the planet.
Today, after more than 60 years of communist revolution and neglect, it is still very beautiful, but its beauty must be guessed among the propped up buildings to avoid landslides, chronic lack of paint and the reluctance of its inhabitants.
Eusebio Leal, the best official who has given that "government of the dead and flowers," as Silvio Rodríguez's song says, has tried to stop this growing deterioration, but a man alone cannot with such a disaster.
What happened in that city? What Aristotle warned in his Political work about two thousand five hundred years ago happened: when everything belongs to everyone, nothing belongs to anyone and the decline begins.
In Havana, everything was from someone, and that person or group was in charge of keeping their property as good as possible. There were literally tens of thousands of owners taking care of their homes and buildings. Neither my immediate family nor I, by the way, were among them.
That is the difference. This is already recognized by Cuban officials in private, and they begin to make timid reforms that are slowly demolishing the communist utopia, although they still reject political pluralism and the existence of human rights.
When property rights are fully restored and, as has happened in almost all countries that abandoned communism, include some form of material satisfaction to the former owners or their descendants, the new cycle of Havana will begin. It will be again a splendid city. Insurance.
