The official press has treated the visit of Miguel Díaz-Canel with great reserve to Santa Clara this Thursday, along with seven other candidates for deputies to the National Assembly of People’s Power. The presence of the president, which will last until Friday, has been characterized by a high level of security, the disagreement of the neighbors and meetings behind closed doors “with the people.”
“It’s an electoral campaign,” he says bluntly to 14ymedio Pedro, an art teacher at a school in the Capiro neighborhood. In their area, the candidates held a meeting with the people of Santa Clara at the Dance and Theater Research Center, a “protected environment” in the vicinity of the monument to the taking of the Armored Train by Ernesto Guevara in 1958.
“Díaz-Canel arrived closely watched by his bodyguards,” says Pedro, for whom the meeting in Santa Clara was “a little bath of a chosen town.” “The other day they said that he had gone to see the people of El Condado,” he says, referring to one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, characterized by a high level of social unrest and police repression. “In the end he didn’t even go in, he stayed with about twenty chosen ones in the little park in Tristá,” he says.
The people of Santa Clara do not welcome Díaz-Canel’s visits to the city due to the deployment of security that it causes and its consequences for daily life. In addition, Pedro complains, “people are saturated with seeing it on the radio and television at all hours. It is an unbearable campaign,” he insists.
The overwhelming propaganda about the figure of Díaz-Canel, Pedro reasons, can only have one explanation: “His re-election is at the peak of his aura. If Raúl dies before the Assembly meets, things will not be so easy.” , think. Although in the end, he admits pessimistically, “his choice or anyone else’s does not depend on the people. This is how socialist ‘democracy’ works.”
“How is it that a deputy so dear to his people has closed the entire detour to Maleza, the Camajuaní highway, and patrols more than two kilometers from where he is?”
In barely two paragraphs and with a few photographs, cubadebate recounts that Díaz-Canel returned to the province of Villa Clara to “resume the exchange” with the inhabitants of the municipality that proposed his candidacy for Parliament. Despite not being from Santa Clara but from Placetas, the president was one of the eight nominees to represent this city.
The provincial press was not very eloquent about the visit either. Vanguard, the newspaper of the Communist Party in Villa Clara, has been out of service for months and its website is currently disabled “due to maintenance tasks”. Only the radio station CMHW exposed the journey of the candidates.
He CMHW report affirms that Díaz-Canel, dressed in a casual, short-sleeved shirt, “talks about everything,” from the “unequivocal support” he owes to the Revolution to minor “concerns,” such as “inflation, the resellers who make him the most difficult life for the people, the acts of corruption”.
The comments of the readers did not wait. “How is it that a deputy so loved and loved by his people has closed the entire detour to Maleza, the Camajuaní highway and patrols… more than two kilometers from where he is?” doctor Marbin Machado ironized about him ” close contact” with voters.
“Right here in Santa Catalina we have not received water for 16 days. I hope one of the candidates says so,” said a user identified as Víctor Álvarez Suárez. Not all comments passed the CMHW censorship filter. “What comment did they delete now? Surely the one that was telling the truth,” denounced the user Betty Camacho Delgado.
Santa Clara elected eight candidates for deputies to Parliament. In addition to Díaz-Canel, the group is also made up of Luis Morlote Rivas, current president of the official Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, Osnay Miguel Colina and Alberto López Díaz, leaders of the Communist Party and the provincial government, respectively, and other officials, like Leonel del Valle Monteagudo, Asiel Aguada Barceló and Clara Nubia Aliaga Castillo.
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