Candidates for Parliament in Cuba have launched an unusual campaign for Sunday’s vote, in a communist country unaccustomed to electoral proselytism and where abstention has grown in recent years.

The 470 candidates, most of whom are members of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), the country’s only party, will be ratified by Cuban voters, for an equal number of seats in the People’s Power National Assembly.

“The campaign has intensified because the government has less reason to trust itself,” given the “smashing” of more than 300,000 Cubans who emigrated in 2022 and abstained in recent elections, political analyst Arturo López-Levy told AFP.

In Cuba, a nation of 11.1 million people where voting is voluntary, turnout has fallen to its lowest level since the current electoral system was introduced in 1976.

In November city elections, golput was 68.5%, lower than referendums for the Family Code (74.12%), in September, and the Constitution (90.15%), in 2019.

For weeks, candidates have traveled to their districts to hear the demands of voters, in meetings widely broadcast on state television, which repeated the slogan “Better Is Possible”. The hashtag #YoVotoXTodos appeared on screens during the newscast.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel, also a congressman and next legislative candidate, has traveled more than a dozen times in recent weeks to his hometown of Santa Clara, a city 280 km from Havana, to mobilize voters.

– “Divorce” –

Sunday’s vote is the first step for a presidential election, for which the candidate will emerge from the new assembly and will be selected in a vote among the same deputies.

Díaz-Canel, 62, the first person to take control of the country after the stipulation of Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, could be re-elected to rule for another five years.

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Cuba’s election law states that “all kinds of individual election propaganda are excluded.”

But for Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a member of the opposition Democratic Transitional Council in Cuba, the government was forced to campaign “as it is done anywhere else in the world.”

“Political realities transcended institutional realities and legal realities, and compelled the government to campaign aware of the growing divorce that exists between its discourse, its governance of the country (…) and where Cuba’s people want to go”, said the political scientist who called for an abstention.

– “Greater autonomy” –

50% of the 470 applicants for the National Assembly of People’s Power are appointed by current deputies and the other half by municipal commissions.

Under this system, voters will find two possibilities on the ballot: the name of each candidate from his district or the option to vote “for all”, meaning supporting all 470 candidates.

“Voice for all” is a united suffrage to reaffirm “socialism” and “revolution”, the authorities insist. But it will also help the candidate to achieve more than 50% of the valid votes on the day, a condition to be elected.

If someone doesn’t get a vote, the position remains vacant. If so, the Council of State, the highest body of the assembly, can appoint a person or allow a city commission to appoint him.

The current electoral process in Cuba comes amid the worst economic crisis in three decades, but also with an increasingly Internet-connected population and a nascent private sector, with independent workers and small and medium enterprises.

“Greater economic autonomy that translates into greater political autonomy of the people” has reduced “the degree of political control that parties exercise over the population,” López Levy estimates.

Academics believe that despite all this, elections continue to be a relevant exercise for the state that “offers the opportunity for the system to dramatically receive feedback, to measure strength and drive progress” to political leaders responding to such demands. from people.

In a country where opposition parties are illegal, calls for abstention have concentrated on social networks as a way of expressing disagreement with government management or with the political system.

“Let your protest be your absence from voting. Let your vote be abstained,” said the Twitter account “Cuba says No to dictatorship,” describing the election process as a “joke.”

The abstainists’ message was “that the electoral system (…) does not respond to the realities of Cuban society today, pluralism, diversity” on the island, says dissident Cuesta Morúa.

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