The Council of State of Cuba called this Tuesday the holding of elections for delegates to the municipal assemblies on November 27.
“The Council of State, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic and Law No. 127 ‘Electoral Law’, of July 13, 2019, agreed to call the voters of the Republic to municipal elections”, refers the call published on the official page of the National Assembly of People’s Power.
The second round of these elections is scheduled for Sunday, December 4, in those constituencies where none of the candidates obtains more than 50% of the votes of the valid votes cast.
In these elections, the delegates to the municipal assemblies of People’s Power will be elected for a period of 5 years in office.
In the last municipal elections held on the island, in 2017, the platform led by the opposition Manuel Cuesta Morúa #Otro18 managed to nominate more than 170 independent candidates. However, after intense harassment, only 53 made their identity known and appeared on public listings, and none managed to be nominated.
“Some were detained so that they could not attend the nomination assemblies where they were going to apply, for others the municipal authorities did not notify them of the day of the assembly so that they would not show up, and even their closest neighbors did not notify them so that they would not show up. find out in other ways,” Cuesta Morúa said at the time.
The opponent also denounced that the police showed up at some nomination assemblies to coerce people into voting and that, even, in a Cienfuegos municipality, the authorities “stole” the vote, by changing the name of the winner in the minutes, who was an independent candidate.
Although the Election Law makes it clear that all Cubans in “full enjoyment of their civil rights” can apply and the pre-candidates are chosen taking into account their merits and abilities, in practice it has hardly been possible for independent people to pass the filter.
The only case occurred in April 2015. On that occasion, in two districts of Havana, two independent, Hildebrando Chaviano and Yuniel López, reached the electoral ballots. Later, the corresponding electoral commissions described them as “counterrevolutionary elements” in the biographies and neither of them was chosen.
The function of the municipal delegates is to “exercise government, to intervene in state decisions that affect the entire community” and will represent the problems, complaints and opinions of their constituency, according to the Parliament’s website.
In the 2017 municipal elections, 27,000 candidates ran for 12,515 delegate positions and more than 7.2 million Cubans cast the vote, 82.05% of citizens.
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