00:01:45.920As you can imagine, I did not leave Cuba looking for better weather.
00:01:50.960I voted with my feet, literally, when voting with your feet was not even in social media,
00:01:57.300looking for an idea of freedom that back then I didn't even know how to properly articulate with words.
00:02:04.620When I arrived to the United States at age 27, freedom against was not some academic idea that I have read
00:02:13.220and I was, you know, very theoretically prepared to explain to anybody.
00:02:16.880It was something that I have to start learning and practice from the scratch.
00:02:22.72025 years later, my warnings about life in Cuba and how it's replicating all over the world in different cultures and languages have become way more simple.
00:02:36.560It is a system, a system, any type of a state or government becomes dangerous when people have no meaningful choices inside it.
00:02:46.080And it becomes even worse when you don't have a realistic way to escape it.
00:02:53.660That is one of the reasons why the whole concept of free cities and special jurisdictions and voluntary and alternative forms of government made so much sense for someone like me.
00:03:04.620So today, instead of debating and analyzing all the issues and problems that we have discussed in the morning and early this afternoon, once again, I want to bring and propose to this audience very radical ideas.
00:03:21.160My question today is, instead of continually asking how do we force one political system to work for everybody, why don't we start asking a more bold, different question?
00:03:38.880Why shouldn't people have more systems of freedom to choose from?
00:03:48.620Government is one of the last major monopolies we are still expected to blindly accept, no questions asked, almost by default.
00:04:01.160How many entrepreneurs do we have here in the room? Just raise your hand.
00:04:06.380We entrepreneurs know that we live by three very basic rules or questions.
00:04:13.820Are people choosing what I have to offer?
00:04:17.920Am I delivering what I promise to keep my client happy and satisfied?
00:04:23.520And what happens if I don't meet the expectations of the market and somebody else comes and offers something better?
00:04:31.420That pressure, obviously, we all know that is uncomfortable, but it's also what keeps us honest and it's what keeps progress and innovation going.
00:04:41.940We entrepreneurs understand competition in restaurants, airlines, technology, banking, education, housing, and almost every other single part of our life in human society.
00:04:55.380Then, when we get to the topic of governance, suddenly competition is treated like a very radical idea.
00:05:03.980The movement of free cities brings precisely that, that missing pressure back into the market of governance.
00:05:18.800At the Free City Foundation, our mission is to educate and advocate for greater choice and competition in what we call the market of living together.
00:05:28.580competition obviously does not guarantee that every provider will be good markets do not promise
00:05:36.100perfection they have never done it what competition does is number one expose failure faster
00:05:41.940imagine how fast would expose the failures of the state and being government reward better ideas
00:05:48.900and give people somewhere else to go when their current provider does not longer meet their needs
00:05:58.780I am not asking anybody in this audience or anywhere else to believe that free cities or the concept of special economic zones or special jurisdictions are going to be like a magic pill that is going to produce a perfect model of governance.
00:06:15.700doing something like that would be denying discipline and denying competition, and it would
00:06:25.000be pretty much like replicating the same centralized state government that we have spent the day
00:06:31.100criticizing and analyzing in this room. For the sake of clarity, when we talk about free cities
00:06:38.100and everything that falls under that umbrella, we're not talking necessarily about a new flag
00:07:19.540Some could be charter city or contract city models like we have in a couple of unincorporated areas in the United States.
00:07:27.660And some are models that we probably have not even created yet.
00:07:32.460And that is precisely the whole point of bringing the radical idea of competition to the market of living together.
00:07:40.140We're not looking for a perfect template. We shouldn't be looking for that. And we don't have to wait for a new flag to begin decentralizing the power where we are living.
00:07:51.880The common thread in this concept and this idea is actually not the flag. It is the jurisdictional choice. It's moving decisions closer to the people directly affected by them and creating room for different rules, different institutions, and different communities to prove themselves.
00:08:11.260For those of us defenders of capitalism, this is where the idea gets very practical.
00:08:19.440The real competitive advantage of embracing decentralized governance, voluntary governance, is not simply low taxes or fewer regulations.
00:08:29.260Please don't buy under the stereotype that these alternative forms of governance are only for rich people finding or trying to look for tax havens.
00:08:38.180The actual potential of it is the predictability of the legal framework.
00:08:44.340We're talking about property rights, clear rules, freedom of contracts, low barriers to entry, and credible dispute resolution.
00:08:54.160For free private cities in particular, the model goes further.
00:08:58.480We're talking about rights and obligations that are defined in a contract that people enter into voluntarily and where disputes can be resolved through an independent arbitration body.
00:09:10.380The latter is very important, again, for those of us that are business owners or entrepreneurs.
00:09:16.280We know that arbitrary risk is very hard to survive.
00:09:20.260The rule that changes after you already invested, after you already opened the doors of your first business, the permit that depends on who is in office and whether he likes your business or not, the contract that means that one thing today, it could be something different tomorrow.
00:09:38.160That's why innovation and capital doesn't move only to places with low taxes.
00:09:43.800They move to places where people believe that tomorrow's rules will still look reasonable, familiar to the rules that they have today.
00:09:53.660And there is a moral point for it too.
00:09:56.920The moral case for competitive governance is not that every market outcome will be perfect.
00:10:03.300We know nothing made by a human being will ever be.
00:10:05.920The moral case begins with the presumption that free adults should be allowed to choose, contract, build, associate, and live without having the state pointing a gun at their heads.
00:10:20.260Consent matters. Exit matters. Choice matters. And the right to refusal is the most important right of all.
00:10:29.760Last week, I've been talking to some of you since yesterday, I was in Roatan, Honduras, inside Prospera, one of the special economic zone cities in Honduras.
00:10:41.320That's where we held the 2026 Free Cities Conference.
00:10:44.860For the first time, we were not sitting in a hotel ballroom in Europe or the United States speculating or theorizing on books and white papers how a free city or special economic zone should look like.
00:10:57.500We held this year's conference Inside One, and that significantly changed the conversation about freedom and our individual right to choose where to live and where to conduct business.
00:11:13.880A theory, like I said before, in a paper or a book may sound like flawless, but trust me, reality of observing operating a free city with your own eyes, it's a better editor than any ideology they want to forfeit us in government-controlled schools.
00:11:32.380While I was in Prospera, we look at an operating special jurisdiction.
00:11:36.860We talk to builders, entrepreneurs, residents, investors, and people dealing with the very real political and legal consequences of being bold enough to try something different.
00:11:50.300Later today in the breakout session, I can go into more details into my testimonial experience visiting both Ciudad Murazan and Prospera.
00:11:59.380But we were able to see what worked, what did not work, and what the next generation of special jurisdictions might look like in real life.
00:12:09.820But for this conversation, I have to tell you that I came back from that conference with three lessons that I believe mattered the most for the audience in this room.
00:12:21.820First is that the special jurisdiction and free cities movement is no longer a theory.
00:12:28.000People are building. People are investing. People are living inside these experiments at testing institutions in the real world.
00:12:38.100Number two, there is no one single template for a free city or a special jurisdiction.
00:12:44.500Prospera does not look like Ciudad Morazán. Ciudad Morazán doesn't look like an intentional community in Eastern Europe.
00:12:51.160A sea-steading project coming out in Panama or the Malvinas will solve a different problem from what a special economic zone could do.
00:13:01.720And that's exactly what we are aiming when we talk about decentralized governance is the future of the human society.
00:13:10.760Number three, and the last lesson, is that builders matter more than ideological purity.
00:13:18.260One of the clearest messages that I heard, especially in Ciudad Morazan, is that you could walk to the residents and ask them, oh, are you a libertarian or a classical liberal?
00:13:29.580And they would literally turn and look at you like you have five heads.
00:13:33.020Because for that market niche, that ideological purity test that we are so used to discuss in the first wars that developed countries doesn't exist.
00:13:43.380For them meant leaving one of the most dangerous criminal zones in Choloma and then finding a city where they can find work, where their children could have safe parks and areas to live and where they could have better choices and less regulations to launch and open their businesses.
00:14:01.880Similarly, in Prospera, one of the lessons was to not try to centrally engineer every economic outcome.
00:14:09.880Instead, they are creating the conditions in which entrepreneurs and communities can discover what works and simply discard what doesn't work.
00:14:19.260Government does not need to predict the winners. That's exactly the problem that we have been discussing most of the day today.
00:14:26.720It needs to stop making it so hard for potential winners to get into the arena in the first place.
00:14:35.200Pretty much, they just need to get out of the way.
00:14:37.800Now, make no mistake, some of these proposals and experiments will fail.
00:14:44.680Markets require the possibility of failure, and failure is information when you are pursuing innovations again in the market of living together.
00:14:55.060However, if every free city had to prove in advance that they would be the best or that they would succeed, again, we would be using the same central planning logic that we claim to reject.
00:15:07.620Some jurisdictions we know would attract entrepreneurs and families, like the example of Ciudad Morazan.
00:15:14.580Others will not. Some regulations will work. Others will be copied, changed, modified, or completely thrown away.
00:15:21.040That is not a weakness in the idea of alternative forms of governance. That's actually the biggest power. The biggest goal is to have that competition and that experiment because the goal is not to find only one centralized system that works for everybody.
00:15:37.260The goal is to have many systems that can compete with each other and let free individuals with unalienable rights decide and pick and choose what works best for them.
00:15:50.520Here in Alberta, I know that you have questions about sovereignty, decentralization, provincial authority, and political distance, and I know that those questions are not theoretical either.
00:16:03.740Many of you might be asking whether decisions that shape your life, business, resources and communities should be made closer to the people who actually have to live with the consequences and literally pick up the pieces of whatever turns out good or bad.
00:16:20.720The free cities movement in general pushes your questions and your concerns a little step further.
00:16:28.520How small can the political decision making be for ordinary people to actually have meaningful choices?
00:16:38.040For some of you, the answer might be greater provincial autonomy.
00:16:42.420For others, it could be a full-blown secession.
00:16:44.820For another group, it could be charter jurisdictions, special economic zones, competitive municipalities, or private communities.
00:16:53.800Regardless of which one is the model that works for every single person, I am less interested, again, in forcing everybody to agree with one destination.
00:17:04.040I am more and more interested in restoring that idea that people-free human beings have the ability to choose what fits better their needs within multiple destinations.
00:17:16.900And that brings me back to Cuba, where I escape one system, one political authority, and only one permissible economic vision.
00:17:27.340Then I arrive in America, and I have to learn freedom from the ground up.
00:17:32.540I learned how to write a check. I learned how to walk into a supermarket and choose from what I felt was an absurd number of different toothpaste.
00:17:44.600And yes, at age 27, I learned how to use a microwave.
00:17:49.880Though things might sound almost ridiculous until you have lived in a place where choice was treated as something dangerous.
00:17:58.320And I know that many of you advocating choices in Alberta have gotten that same feeling.
00:18:05.160So freedom becomes real when, again, you are able to provide ordinary choices for ordinary people to pick from.
00:18:12.940Choice for work, choice of enterprise, of association, where to live.
00:18:18.760So the question, again, is why shouldn't governance be deception?
00:18:24.100Why cannot we have different choices and options for the governance that we want to opt in?
00:18:32.460The future of liberty, free markets, and human flourishing cannot depend entirely on winning the next election.
00:18:40.220We have discussed how the political system works by now.
00:18:43.780It cannot depend on whether we persuade 51% of the population or waiting for a national government to reform itself.
00:18:53.580We should keep fighting for a better government.
00:18:57.140But at the same time, we have to proactively start building alternative solutions.
00:19:02.200We should build those places where rules are clear, rights are protected, enterprise is welcome, and people can choose to come or choose to leave.
00:19:14.480Freedom with memory teaches you that you cannot take choices for granted with anything in life,
00:19:21.400and you should not take it with the government that you opt in either.
00:19:25.320That's why free cities are the future, because freedom will need somewhere to go.
00:19:31.480Señora y señores, let's stop arguing and let's start building places where this freedom can move on and live.