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Candidates for Parliament in Cuba have deployed an unusual campaign for Sunday’s vote, in this communist country unaccustomed to electoral proselytism and where abstentionism has grown in recent years. The 470 applicants, the majority of whom are members of the Communist Party of Cuba, the only party in the country, will be subject to ratification by the Cuban voters, for an equal number of places in the National Assembly of People’s Power.
For weeks, the candidates have been going to their districts to listen to the demands of the voters, in meetings widely broadcast on state television. President Miguel Díaz-Canel, also a congressman and candidate for the next legislature, has traveled more than a dozen times in recent weeks to his native Santa Clara, a city 280 km from Havana, to mobilize voters. Díaz-Canel, 62, the first to take the reins of the country after the brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, could be re-elected to govern for five more years.
In Cuba, a country of 11.1 million inhabitants where voting is voluntary, participation has fallen to its lowest levels since the entry into force of the current electoral system in 1976. In the November municipal elections, abstention was 68 .5%, less than that of the referendums for the Family Code (74.12%), in September, and for the Constitution (90.15%), in 2019. Abstention is important, as explained to our envoy by a elector: “The majority of the population will not vote and if they do, it will be blank, because they don’t care. The one who comes out, we don’t know him or he’s not going to solve a problem for us “
Sunday’s vote is a preliminary step for the presidential election, whose candidate will emerge from the new assembly and will be chosen in a vote among the same deputies.
50% of the 470 applicants for the National Assembly of People’s Power were appointed by the current deputies and the other half by municipal commissions. In this system, voters will find two possibilities on the ballot: the name of each candidate from their district or the option to vote “for all”, which implies supporting all 470 candidates, a united suffrage to reaffirm “socialism” and the “revolution”, say the authorities. But it would also help candidates to reach more than 50% of the valid votes in the day, a requirement to be elected.
If someone does not get the votes, the position remains vacant. If so, the Council of State, the highest instance of the assembly, can appoint someone or allow the municipal commissions to appoint him.
The current electoral process in Cuba takes place in the midst of the worst economic crisis in three decades, but also with a population increasingly connected to the Internet and a nascent private sector, with independent workers and small and medium-sized companies. Last Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States government does not plan to take Cuba out from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. In January 2021, his predecessor, Republican Mike Pompeo, reintroduced Cuba on the list of states that promote terrorism, hindering foreign investment due to the legal consequences they could incur in the United States.
In a country where opposition parties are illegal, calls for abstentionism are concentrated on social networks as a way of expressing disagreement with the government’s management or with the political system. The message of the abstentionists is that the electoral system is no longer responding to the reality of Cuban society or to pluralism and diversity.
with AFP
