5 ideas
Vargas Llosa co-signed a protest letter from European and Latin American intellectuals and broke with the Cuban Revolution he had championed. The episode is his concrete evidence that a revolution which needs coerced confessions from its writers has already become a police state, whatever its social achievements.
It bought intellectuals with posts and patronage and absorbed dissent instead of crushing it. It was 'perfect' because it hid its authoritarian core behind democratic forms, which made it more durable and harder to denounce than an open military regime.
The desire for a perfect society is legitimate and even fertile in literature, where it harms no one. Applied to government, the same desire demands one blueprint for everyone, so it must suppress dissent and override actual people for the sake of an imagined future. That is why revolutionary utopias end in tyranny. Liberal democracy is preferable because it aims only at gradual, correctable improvement and accepts imperfection.
Vargas Llosa treats appeals to national, ethnic or indigenous 'identity' as a fiction that dissolves the individual into a tribe defined by others. The idea of an authentic collective essence gives nationalists, populists and ideologues a reason to police who counts as a true member. The only identity worth defending is the one each individual freely chooses and revises.
Following Popper and Hayek, Vargas Llosa argues that markets, private property and the rule of law disperse power. Without them the state controls people's livelihoods and can reward loyalty and punish dissent. Latin American failures came from mercantilism, meaning privileges granted by a state tied to favored interests, not from capitalism. For the same reason he opposes Fujimori-style regimes that pair market reforms with a 'self-coup' against Congress and the courts.