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The only requirement is to receive majority support
BY MARÍA JULIA MAYORAL—Granma daily staff writer—
THE exercise of political rights
in Cuba is undergoing another critical test.
Beginning today, and until March 24, tens of
thousands of voter assemblies will take place, and
more than eight million citizens will nominate their
candidates for municipal delegates. Anyone may be
nominated in these meetings; the only requirement is
to receive majority support.
To have at once the ability and
the legal power to be the person who both proposes
and nominates, directly, instead of having electoral
machinery do it for you, is a privilege with respect
to the current state of the world, affirms Ricardo
Alarcón Quesada, president of the National Assembly
of People’s Power, in an interview with Granma
daily.
It is important, he says, that in
each voting district, we reflect on who would be the
best choice, in the people’s opinion. We enjoy a
unique privilege, and that power should be used with
the utmost wisdom.
Who would the best candidates be?
The answer to that, notes the Political Bureau
member, must come from the citizens in each
district. Nobody, whether members of the electoral
commissions, or government or party authorities,
will assume the responsibility of thinking for the
people; therein lies the importance of dialogue
amongst the people in each nomination assembly.
Our system – he recalls – is
based on rejecting the demagoguery and cheating that
is routine elsewhere, where candidates come into
contact with the people and make promises to win
votes, but then rarely keep their word, much less
maintain periodic contact with their constituents.
In the case of Cuba, he
reflected, those who occupy elected posts do not
change their natures; they continue to be neighbors
of the voters; they do not receive privileges or
charge a cent for their work as representatives.
They continue to be members of the community, their
strength is found in their links with the people and
this relationship has to be present from the very
start of the process: the nomination assemblies.
SHARING, NOT HANDING OVER RIGHTS
It is not the individual delegate
alone who solves problems, such a person does not
exist; rather, the delegate should be a citizen
whose abilities and effectiveness are in direct
relation to collective participation by the
community in common tasks and problems, Alarcón
noted.
“It is through the delegate that
the voters and the political system are naturally
joined together. Thus, the delegate should be
capable of organizing and leading the community, of
participating in the municipal government, and of
contributing to the decision-making in both the
provincial and national spheres.”
The delegate, he emphasizes, is
part of the municipal assembly, which among other
responsibilities, appoints, controls and supervises
local administration. Moreover, any delegate may
eventually be president of a municipal assembly,
member of his or her provincial assembly or
parliamentary deputy. All of these things must be
thought about at the time of proposing and
nominating candidates.
NECESSARY IMPROVEMENTS
Billions of people around the
world, stated Alarcón, would like to know whether
their electoral rights have been recognized.
Billions of people want to be able to control these
mechanisms in order to counteract the power of the
political machinery established to remove the
liberties of citizens. Billions of people would also
like to have, if only once in a lifetime, the
opportunity to nominate candidates.
For the Cuban people, he
explained, all these aspirations are realities that
have been carried out for almost 30 years, and if we
are capable of exercising these rights with vigor
and intensity, as well creating another political
bastion with these elections, we would also be
achieving another important step towards perfecting
the system of People’s Power.
Like all human work, he
concluded, the representative structures of the
Cuban state are open to improvement, and the key to
this step forward is the conscious participation of
the people, their genuine incorporation into all
aspects of the system, that views the people as the
protagonists.
“The privilege of exercising
civil and political rights is a dream for the vast
majority of humanity and deserves a responsible
attitude on the part of the Cuban people.”
US INTERFERENCE IN CUBAN
ELECTIONS
BY JUAN MARRERO —Granma daily
staff writer—
• I know that it will not
astonish or surprise anyone if I say that US
interference in Cuban affairs, ever since they
militarily occupied the country at the end of the
19th century, has been very much a part of the
electoral process.
What occurred in 1900 is
illustrative:
Leonardo Wood, the military governor, convened
municipal elections to elect mayors, treasurers and
judges for a one-year term, but only certain men
could participate – those who could read and
write; they also had to possess at least 250 pesos
in personal property or real estate, an amount that
was unthinkable for most Cubans.
Only 7% of a population of
approximately 1.57 million had the right to vote. A
large part of that percentage, therefore, favored
seeing Cuba as a star on the US flag, or at least as
a protectorate. Women were excluded from those
elections, and thus neither appeared on the voters’
lists nor cast their vote at the polls. For many
decades, they were deprived of this right. It was
not until 1936 that, for the first time, they could
elect and be elected.
The essence
of the US electoral system was automatically
transferred to Cuba in time for the 1902 elections.
The Senate was constituted, for example, through
elections established to select four senators per
province for eight-year terms, via a secondary vote
by the so-called provincial councilors and
convention delegates. Some 50% of these delegates
was made up of the richest taxpayers, resulting in
decisive participation in the elections by members
of the oligarchy.
In that system, it was the wealthy candidates who
were privileged. Only the House of Representatives
was chosen by direct vote.
One of those elected during that
time was Tomás Estrada Palma, who shortly before had
renounced his US citizenship. He had made a valuable
contribution to the nascent empire four years
earlier, in 1898, when he dissolved the Cuban
Revolutionary Party founded by José Marti, leaving
the people without an authentic political force to
represent and guide it through such crucial and
confused moments.
In the weeks leading up to those
elections, there was so much dirty maneuvering,
backed by Governor Wood, that Bartolomé Masó,
well-respected and loved by the people, with a
history of struggle and a firm supporter of
independence, decided at the last minute to abandon
the race. Consequently, the Yankees’ favorite
candidate, Estrada Palma, with only 47% of the votes
cast, became the president of the republic born
under the humiliating Platt Amendment.
Another scandalous event related
to Washington’s hand in the Cuban electoral process
occurred in 1907, in the midst of the second US
military intervention. The Empire created a
consultative convention, presided over by Colonel
Enoch Crowder, in order to create additional laws to
the 1901 Constitution, including an electoral law.
Fortunately, the convention included certain
prominent Cubans, including Juan Gualberto Gómez,
who blocked maneuvers aimed at giving foreigners the
legal right to vote.
At that time, 30% of Cuba’s
population was foreign-born. In the city of Havana,
for example, only 35,000 of the 75,000 people of
electoral age – older than 21 – were Cubans, and 60%
of them could not vote because they were illiterate.
Juan Gualberto Gómez achieved the incorporation of
universal suffrage into electoral law, although
women continued to be excluded.
With even greater interventionist
gusto, Crowder returned to Cuba in 1921. From his
place on a battleship moored in the port, using
threats of the Platt Amendment and masquerading as a
moralist and a fighter against corruption and fraud,
he set about sending a series of memorandums to
President Alfredo Zayas, including one on the
electoral register with instructions on how to
proceed. In that neocolonial republic, our people
had to endure such crude
and humiliating acts.
In that memorandum, Crowder
expressed concern over the adoption of the permanent
electoral register and claimed that through fraud
and corruption, the voters’ lists had been inflated
in the 1918 elections. He added that in one of the
municipalities, the number of voters had exceeded
the total population by many thousands, and that in
all the other municipal areas, the lists were
enormously inflated.
The US proconsul demanded that
President Zayas give his “utmost attention” to the
matter of the electoral registers, given that the
Central Electoral College had enforced a regulation
excluding all voters who had not voted in the
partial elections of 1921. The proconsul asserted
that according to an amendment to the 1919 Electoral
Code, such a decision could only be modified by a
Congressional act or by the restitution via petition
of every excluded citizen 119 days before the
elections set for November 1, 1922.
Crowder stated that “there was a
very short amount of time to completely decide on
the enormous number of new provisions,” and
requested that the Central Electoral College pass a
special emergency rule to facilitate a better way of
compiling and preparing the registers for the next
biennial elections. Colonel Crowder’s intrusion
extended even to those electoral details. |
