MIAMI, United States. – The opposition group Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba (CTDC) reported this Monday that one of the independent candidates he supports managed to be nominated as a candidate for delegate with a view to the elections that are scheduled for November 27, according to a report by the organization quoted by the news agency EFE.
This is José Antonio Cabrera Parada, a 30-year-old who lives in the Santiago municipality of Palma Soriano and works as a baker.
According to the statement cited by EFE, Cabrera Parada is the only one of the seven candidates supported by the CTDC who managed to be nominated. During the candidate nomination process, the opposition group denounced irregularities and violations of “the Constitution and the current Electoral Law itself.”
In its statement, the CTDC assured that the candidate close to the opposition “has already been visited by the political police.”
The group called the nomination “a similar success to those independent candidates nominated in 2015,” the year the opposition first won some candidacies for constituency delegate elections.
Of the other six candidacies supported by the CTDC, three failed to win the nomination in the constituency assemblies, controlled by the Communist Party of Cuba. Two other would-be nominees were prevented by the regime from running; meanwhile, the latter was not notified of the nomination meeting, which would have been held in secret, without public announcement.
With the support of these candidacies, the opposition group sought a “plural expression” of the “demands of a broad electoral segment” that does not feel represented by the ruling party, as well as “normalizing political competition from below” and “building democracy”.
Even though it considers that its electoral system is a “genuine representation of the grassroots democracy that prevails in the country,” the Cuban regime intervenes in the nomination assemblies to prevent the nomination of dissident candidates.
For its part, the CTDC considers that the Cuban government and the PCC have “leadership exhausted” and “eroded” since the mass protests of July 2021. In addition, it points out that the system suffers from a “progressive vacuum of representation.”
For this reason, initiatives such as that of the independent candidates offer a “new alternative of representation” and contribute to the “peaceful transition towards democracy”, considers the opposition group.
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