HAVANA, Cuba. – On February 13, the newspaper Granma announced that Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern introduced a bill in the United States House of Representatives with the intention of lifting the embargo against Cuba. The congressman, with a long history of trying to improve relations with the regime, stated that “the Cuban people – not Washington politicians – must decide about their own leaders and their own future.”
However, perhaps Mr. McGovern does not know – or does not want to know – that the Cuban people have been denied during this long period of Castroism in power the possibility of deciding on their future. Here is the following question: would the congressman accept that in the next presidential elections in his country, only the Republican Party, in power, would take its candidate to the television cameras to make known its government program, while that possibility was closed to the Democratic opposition?… We are convinced that Mr. McGovern’s answer would be negative.
Well, a political anomaly similar to that is what has been present in Cuba. Here, on all occasions when the people have been called to the polls, the only opinion that is expressed in the media – especially on radio and television – is the one that suits the rulers. This is what happened with the plebiscite on Constitution of the Republicand the query about the Family Code. In both cases the population was saturated with the official message that they will vote YES to approve these documents. Even given the fact that some independent media suggested voting NO in the plebiscite to approve the 2019 Constitution, something perfectly normal in other places, the reaction of the ruling party, through Mariela Castro Espín, was that “they intended to sabotage the plebiscite.”
Consequently, we cannot accept that the spokespersons for the regime argue that the Cuban people gave themselves the type of government they preferred when the Constitution was “approved” in February 2019. That was a circus farce rather than a true vote.
It is well known that a true election, or any other consultation at the polls, is not limited to the moment in which the voter deposits his ballot in the ballot box. There is a previous moment, perhaps more important than the previous one, in which the different political parties or options for which people are voting go to the television cameras to present their different points of view, and thus provide voters with real options to carry out the vote.
Here in Cuba, on the contrary, the vast majority of voters who do not have the possibility of witnessing an opinion different from that of the government on television are manipulated. An opinion that expresses that the option of voting against the interests of power is valid, and that does not mean that one will stop being Cuban or loving one’s country.
It must be added that the Cuban rulers have always responded with silence whenever they are urged to organize a real election, with the participation of the opposition before the television cameras to express their points of view. This happened, for example, with an open letter sent to Fidel Castro from Paris in 1990, and which was sponsored, among others, by the writers Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
The day that the Castro dictatorship allows the Cuban people to express their opinion or listen to something different from what suits the machinery of power, then we will be able to begin to listen to statements like those of Congressman Jim McGovern.
