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Fidel
endorses the just nature of the united vote as a
revolutionary strategy
SPEAKING on last
night’s TV Roundtable on this Sunday’s
elections, President Fidel Castro reaffirmed the
need for the population’s united vote as a way of
safeguarding the gains of the Revolution. The
president read out a letter he directed to voters in
1993, which he regarded as still being fully
applicable, by which he called on today’s
8,276,000-plus enfranchised citizens to wage this
battle with honor.
 His
letter states that the united or block vote is a
revolutionary strategy, not a mere slogan, and
clarified that although Cubans can vote for one,
various, all or none of the candidates, the election
of many little-known nominees - nevertheless with
equally outstanding merits - is a just step to take.
Fidel called on
Cubans with the right to vote to demonstrate to the
world, with a new victory, the strength and unity of
the people in their struggle to keep alive the
values that they hold dear, and defended the
eminently democratic nature of the Cuban electoral
system, in which deputies and delegates are directly
elected by the people, after being proposed by the
island’s mass and social organizations.
Those nominations,
he explained, make up the candidacy after a
consultation process with dozens of institutions of
every kind, without any intervention in terms of
money, publicity for certain nominations or other
phenomena of that nature generally found in the
capitalist countries, where financial resources
determine electoral success.
In his address,
Fidel outlined the ethnic composition of the new
slate, observing the increased percentage of black
and mixed race candidates, as well as women - who
currently constitute 65% of the country’s
technical force - brought about by the electoral
processes of 1992-3, 1997, and this of 2002-3.
The president
reiterated the irrevocable nature of the island’s
socialism and urged the Revolution’s enemies not
to dream of mechanisms to destroy it, which have
failed time and time again in more than 40 years of
arduous battles. (AIN)
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