Concerning a multilateral approach, I think politically it would not be wise for us to do this in conjunction with the U.S. The quickest way to get a no from Castro and the Cubans I think would be to involve the Americans. It's entirely a tactical question here, because they have always used U.S. policy towards Cuba—including an invasion of Cuba in the past, of course—as something that's just anathema.
So I think it could be counterproductive. Any efforts we make should be on a bilateral basis, or with our democratic friends in the European Union. I would just avoid the linkage, for this kind of conference that we're talking about particularly, with the U.S.
On the other question, to understate it considerably, if I heard you correctly—“What about a post-Castro Cuba?”—part of the very long discussion that, as I mentioned, I had with him in 1990 or 1991, a three-and-a-half hour discussion, focused exactly on that, in a way: on what had been going on in Europe in the previous two years after Mr. Gorbachev took his really significant leadership on the then-Soviet side.
My view was that in Cuba there could be some reasonable chance—could be, and may be, but I would think with all the intervening years it's less likely—of preserving.... I've heard what our other guests here have had to say, but compared with some of the progress that has been made in other Latin American countries, the sooner the Cuban authorities, the Communist Party of Cuba, opens itself to reform within, the greater the opportunity, it seems to me, they have of preserving some of the gains that in one sense they have made.
But the longer they delay this, the greater the likelihood, in my view—and I don't think it takes a political genius to see this—to have the most extreme, and I choose my words with care here, of the Cubans who have “gone to Miami”, to put it that way.... I'm not saying all the Cubans who have gone there are extreme; I want to be clear on that. But there is a strong—and I use my words with care—right-wing element there, and the longer Castro waits on reform, the greater the likelihood, it seems to me, that you will get if not anti-democratic, then extreme right people coming in from Florida, joining with those in Cuba itself, for understandable reasons, to overthrow all the good with the bad.
He wasn't open to this argumentation at all. He did not want to provide any internal freedom at all to set the stage for a peaceful transition of the kind you had in Czechoslovakia. It had a democratic tradition, though, in a way that Cuba never had.
So to say the least, it's very complex and very uncertain, but the longer there's a delay from the regime itself in making more space for political and civil rights, the greater the likelihood I think that we're going to get an extremist government of another kind there.