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HAVANA (AFP) — Convalescing Cuban leader Fidel Castro slammed US
elections Saturday as fraud-plagued contests for millionaires, as he
urged countrymen to vote in the Americas' only one-party communist
system Sunday.
"Our elections are the antithesis of those held in United States ...
There, first you have to be very rich, or have an enormous amount of
money behind you," said Castro, 81, who 15 months ago handed over the
reins of power to his brother Raul Castro after major intestinal surgery.
In the United States "to be elected president, you need hundreds of
millions (of dollars), which come straight out of the coffers of the big
monopolies. A candidate can win who actually got a minority of the
popular vote," Castro marvelled in a jab at US President George W. Bush
who, thanks to the unusual US electoral college system, won the
presidency in 2000 though Al Gore won the popular vote.
"There is fraud, trickery, ethnic discrimination and even violence,"
Castro said of the US electoral system, in his latest missive in Granma,
the Cuban Communist Party newspaper.
Though Cuba considers its elections democratic, the United States and
many western nations see the Cuban electoral process as bereft of what
they see as the very essence of democracy: choice.
"It continues to be the same model of voting under a totalitarian regime
which is solely interested in perpetuating itself and legitimizing
itself," said Elizardo Sanchez, a spokesman for an assembly of Cuba's
outlawed dissident groups.
Indeed, with the Cuban government's habit of crushing dissent, "the
atmosphere of intolerance and the lack of respect for freedoms and
political and civil rights, make it impossible for the electoral process
to be democratic," said prominent dissident Oswaldo Paya.
Paya in 2002 launched a legal challenge to the government seeking to
open and reform the system from within rather than demanding it
immediately be replaced. He delivered more than 11,000 petitions to the
National Assembly seeking change but the government rejected the plea.
National Assembly speaker Ricardo Alarcon in a recent interview said
Cuban opposition members can run in Cuba's elections as long as they
find someone willing to nominate them. Critics, however, say that since
nominations have to be sought and voted on in public open-air
assemblies, there is no such real freedom to nominate opposition members
because those who do could face reprisals from authorities.
Sunday, more than 8.3 million Cubans over the age of 16 (in a country of
11.2 million) are summoned to vote for 15,236 council persons in a
tiered system in place since 1976, which in early 2008 is supposed to
yield the 31 members of the Council of State which for more than five
decades has been led by Fidel Castro.
"I am going to go and vote bright and early to get it over with," a
28-year-old woman law student told AFP. "I don't want them coming and
knocking on my door, and I don't want to end up with a record. ... (but)
I'm not going because I think anything is going to change," she added.
Although last year Cuban officials insisted that Fidel Castro would
return to work as prior to his illness, they long since have stopped
making such predictions.
The elections are expected to clarify whether the status quo of an
interim government led by Raul Castro will be left in place with Fidel
formally at the helm.
While any initial fears that the Cuban government would collapse in
Fidel's absence have subsided, the government headed by Raul Castro
faces a plethora of acute problems from rock-bottom salaries, to
crippling shortages in the transportation and housing sectors and an
ever rising cost of living.
Many Cubans expect that Fidel Castro will be sidelined definitively,
while continuing to write his commentaries, and that Raul Castro
eventually will wade into some cautious economic reforms.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gi7ZuhhsqNNUJnCkwq30abAxnIxQ
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