Thanks to this media irresponsibility, most people outside of Cuba are unaware that Fidel Castro is, in fact, re-elected periodically. They accept the conventional wisdom that there are no freedom, no democracy, and no elections in Cuba. Because this false impression is spread so widely throughout the foreign media, it is worth looking at carefully. While the White House, Congress, and the dutiful media call for "electoral democracy" in Cuba, Cubans shake their heads and ask, "What do you mean by 'free elections?
What kind of 'democracy' do you want us to have? Like Kuwait's, where the people have no say in their government, and women aren't allowed to participate at all?
Like the bloody, repressive Pinochet dictatorship the United States helped install and maintain in Chile, who killed the elected President and thousands of other Chilean citizens? Like in Miami, the world's seat of electoral fraud?
Their claim is based in part on the fact that their governmental system is much more participatory, and that it doesn't cost anything to be a candidate in their system -- a valid argument that deserves to be heard and debated.
But there are even more extreme examples of the way the U. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "It is very important for us all to work together to press the Castro government to allow for there to be elections and a transition to democracy " emphasis added. In this case, Albright and the wire service conveniently dropped the qualifying adjective "free," and simply told us there are no elections in Cuba. It is amazing and as a U. It is oe thing to say that Cuba's form of electoral democracy is not up to par.
It is quite another thing to deny its existence entirely. No one has disputed these electoral figures. No one has charged ballot box stuffing. The only complaints the United States has voiced regarding these and previous elections is the form in which candidates are chosen for the highest offices. The fact is that all local, district, and provincial delegates are chosen by standard electoral models used the world over. There must be two or more candidates, whom anyone can nominate at open public meetings.
People can even nominate themselves. There is universal suffrage for those who are 16 years and older, with no racial, gender, religious, or political discrimination. There is a secret ballot. Moreover, unlike certain countries whose "democracy" the United States touts, voting in Cuba is not obligatory, although there is heavy social pressure to do so.
These elected delegates in turn appoint an electoral commission of individuals selected by civil, social, trade union, women's, student and political organizations. It's the electoral commission's job to carry out a massive grassroots selection process to represent the broadest cross-section of the Cuban population in a slate of candidates for the higher offices of the National Assembly. In this year's elections, the electoral commission analyzed over 60, proposals, discussing them with over a million voters, individually and through their civic, social, political, and trade union organizations, in order to come up with the final, non-partisan slate.
Cuban electors are then asked to vote to accept or reject -- individually or collectively -- the slate. If the system functions correctly, those on the ballot will actually represent all sectors. Can it be said that in every election in the United States the two rarely is it more than this candidates for any given post truly represent the wishes of the electorate?
T here is another important aspect of Cuba elections: Cubans don't have to vote, but they do. Each Cuban voter can select all, none, or whichever of those proposed candidates he or she believes would be a good national representative for all of the people, or for a particular constituency. There is no marking on the ballots that could indicate how a particular person voted. Dick Cluster, who traveled to Cuba with the first group but has never met Bass, told me to think about the group in the context of the time, and especially the anti—Vietnam War movement.
Young, leftist Americans were suspicious of what they saw as American imperialism. The Brigade immediately became a Cold War obsession in Washington, where opposition to Cuba was as much an issue for Democrats as Republicans. After Bass graduated high school, a classmate who had traveled to Cuba with the first Venceremos Brigade connected her with the program, and she decided to go.
She was 19 the first time she landed in Havana, in She remembers spending her time in Cuba building houses—work she compared to that of Habitat for Humanity. There was great music, rum, dancing. And we toured the country. That was the contrast she saw between American activists and Cubans at the time. No, I did not know anybody like that. He now runs a business that specializes in building luxury homes in Malibu.
It is now home to the Cuban National Ballet and named for the Cuban-born former Ballet Theater principal who returned to her homeland to found the company. We climb an astonishing, cascading, twining stair to an enormous white room with a frieze of putti, trellises, garlands, and escutcheons; it makes the Palais Garnier, in Paris, seem restrained. I struggle to follow the Spanish and keep pace with the images of the award-winning projects. Eventually I give up and concentrate on the decorations.
Nearby is the former National Capitol building with a dome similar to that of the U. A man hangs out laundry as we pass. We have special permission to enter the former Capitol. The seat of government from until the revolution, then the Cuban Academy of Science, it is now being restored to its original function. The long, high-ceilinged entrance hall with its tall pilasters, coffered barrel-vaults, and a monumental symbolic sculpture is very splendid.
We want to see more, but most of the building is closed. We escape our handlers, explore a hallway, and discover a handsome hemispherical chamber with an arcaded balcony. Our phalanx of bici-taxis fills the street. The drivers seem to be racing, coming disturbingly close to each other, and blasting a cacaphony of warning horns and whistles, as we speed along. The many vehicles seem to have fused into one pulsating, shifting mass, like a school of fish.
But the most fascinating part of the outing is watching the startled Cubans on the sidewalks, as the tsunami of jostling bici-taxis sweeps by. The site of a proposed Chinese-financed hotel nearby alarms everyone; the picture on the site hoarding does not look promising.
The sunset view from the restaurant is glorious. We sit outside and watch the lights come on in Old Havana across the water. Also better mojitos and slightly better food. More lectures, the next day, on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture, at the Fine Arts Museum, which we also explore. Not surprisingly, the early work on view seems competent but provincial and often turns out to have been made about twenty years later than we might suspect.
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