The Guardian 27 April, 2005
Where real people’s power rules
W T Whitney
Millions of Cubans elected delegates to their nation’s 169 municipal assemblies on April 17. The elections came at the end of a two-month long process in which the people themselves exercised their right to select, elect and be elected.
The municipal assemblies determine the makeup of the provincial and national assemblies and control the administration of local government.
National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon told reporters that the elections took place at a decisive moment, when the US is escalating its threats against Cuba. The electoral process was conducted with “vigour and intensity,” he said, and had the effect of strengthening People’s Power, the grassroots system of participatory democracy of socialist Cuba.
The process began in February when 15,000 electoral districts began putting on public display people’s names to create a list of electors. Citizens had one month to add names of newcomers or remove names of people who had died or moved away. Then, between February 25 and March 24, more than 8 million Cubans came together in 41,063 assemblies to nominate a total of 32,368 candidates. The result was that, on election day, from two to eight candidates were up for election in each municipality.
Candidates’ biographies
Municipalities put up public displays of the candidates’ biographies and their pictures. On election day, children monitored the polling places while adult citizens looked in on the ballot counting.
Well over 90 percent of Cubans exercised their right to vote. A run-off election occurs if no one candidate secures 50 percent of the vote, and assembly delegates can be recalled at the behest of 20 percent of either voters or of other delegates.
Alarcon pointed out that the people themselves run elections rather than political parties corrupted by money and prone to demagoguery. “What we have is not perfect, but compared to the fiction of bourgeois representative democracy, our model is a shining sun”, he said.
The elections are non-partisan, and almost 25 percent of the candidates are not members of the Communist Party. Cuba passed new election laws in 1992 to expand the people’s role in choosing members of the provincial assemblies and the National Assembly. Now, an electoral commission spends a year or so travelling throughout the country sifting through proposed nominees.
In 2002, for example, 32,585 candidates were nominated at grassroots assemblies for the 14,949 seats up for election. Nearly 82 percent of the voters participated in the process. Over 7000 of the candidates were proposed at provincial meetings of mass organisations and another 16,000 at national meetings of mass organisations, which include women’s organisations, labour unions, and farmers’ and students groups.
Participation
Commenting on Cuba’s elections and system of governance, Isaac Saney, author of the recently published Cuba: Revolution in Motion, said, “In a very real sense the level of Cuban popular participation in day-to-day politics exceeds that of the West, where political participation for the vast majority is limited to casting a ballot at election time.”
People’s Weekly World