My latest piece for Commentator, co-authored with Pratik Chougule, describes in broad terms how we might do some good solid work to build on the Obama Administration move to start normalising US relations with Cuba, by actively but sensibly doing the spadework needed to help Cuba get ready for the day a new democratic government takes over:

In 1999, the United Kingdom with the United States and key European partners made a strategic decision to prepare for the end of Serbia’s Milosevic regime.

British officials established in neighboring Budapest a base for post-regime planning and hosted seminars and workshops on practical policy themes: agriculture, water, taxation, education, environment, health, urban planning and so on.

The aim was to work up operational policy dossiers that might help Serbia’s eventual new democratic government get off to a strong start. Enthusiastic young Serbs themselves took the lead in much of this work.

When Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in a popular rebellion in 2000, many of these experts went on to become Ministers and senior officials in the transitional government …

The United States and its allies should launch a similar process for Cuba. An allocation of no more than a few millions dollars could establish a Cuba Transformation Initiative, based in a friendly Latin American country, to start planning for a new, democratic Cuba.

This initiative sends all the right signals. It tells the Castro regime elite that their dreary game is up — western governments are now working on the assumption that sooner or later Cuba will have a government chosen through free elections that will build a society based on robust market principles.

It also sends a message to those who will comprise Cuba’s first post-communist leaders: western governments are on your side by investing in your responsibility and patriotism. These two messages together underscore another message to potential waverers within the communist hierarchy: when the pivotal moment comes and the regime totters, side with the future, not the past.

I helped launch the corresponding idea for Serbia back in 1999.

The key point about this idea is that it gets Cuba’s future leaders focused on the key objective. Not ending Castroist communism. That’s the easy bit. The really difficult task is building something robust and far better, a task of decades. That means detailed thought in advance about hard policy options: taking seriously the responsibility of success:

It will not be the job of the Cuba Transformation Initiative to anoint new leaders. But it can set up policy “baskets” for each Ministry in a plausible new Cuban government and determine how to sequence key economic and social reforms.

It can draft rules for managing and targeting foreign assistance to help ensure that Cubans are not swept aside by the tsunami of well-funded foreign experts that will descend on Cuba when Castroism collapses. It can draft options for a new democratic constitution and identify fair voting systems that suit Cuba’s geography and traditions.

It can make proposals for dealing with the sprawling communist-era archives, including secret police records. It can tackle difficult moral questions in the transition, drawing on best practice from South Africa, Poland and elsewhere. How should the new government balance reconciliation with human rights, transparency and justice for the regime’s worst elements?

With a strong body of world-class professional analysis and insight already prepared, Cuba’s first democratic government will hit the ground running.

An offshore thinktank set up along these lines could also draw on crowd-sourced ideas from all sorts of other transition cases, good and bad. It could not only identify radical clever new ideas – it could also show the way to radical clever new ways of running a country.

Plenty here for both Right and Left and Libertarian to enjoy and agree with. Not least the proposition that Cubans themselves need empowering to help deal with the cynical onslaught that the EU/US development assistance industry will deliver as communism collapses.

All it needs is a puny sum of money to set it up, and clear lively leadership.

Come on, Republican Congress and Obama folk. This is an Easy Win.