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Politics : About that Cuban boy, Elian -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Machaon who wrote (2186)	4/24/2000 12:39:00 PM
From: JEB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9127

Cuba Uses Local Polls to Counter Rights Criticism Sunday, April 23, 2000 & By Pascal Fletcher HAVANA (Reuters) - Cubans voted on Sunday in one-party local elections hailed by the communist government as a patriotic exercise to rebuff foreign criticism of its human rights record. Cuba's governing Communist Party used the elections, in which voters were offered a choice of candidates but no alternatives to single-party rule, to counter censure by the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The U.N. rights forum in Geneva passed a resolution last week criticizing President Fidel Castro's government for repressing political dissidents and religious groups. "The presence of more than 7.5 million Cubans at the polls will be the firmest response possible to the infamy of Geneva," Juventud Rebelde, the official newspaper of Cuba's communist youth movement, said in a front page editorial on Sunday. Castro's government has reacted angrily to the U.N. censure motion, accusing the European and other countries who voted for it as "lackeys and puppets" of the United States in its long-standing hostile policy toward Cuba. Voters turned out early across the Caribbean island on Easter Sunday to elect 14,686 representatives to sit on local municipal assemblies in Cuba's "People's Power" system in which the ruling Communist Party is the only political party allowed. In Havana and other cities, Catholics and other religious worshippers attended Easter services on Sunday. The authorities allowed a midnight Easter procession to go ahead at Havana Cathedral on Saturday night but on Sunday the only processions visible were those of voters going dutifully to the polls. Voting was not obligatory but an intense propaganda campaign by state media, backed up by door-to-door calls by members of local neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), urged electors to go to the polls. "I've just voted. They say it's not obligatory but you have to vote and early too. If not, they take note," one Havana housewife, who asked not to be named, said. President Castro, 73, who has ruled the island for four decades since he toppled right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1959 revolution, voted in a Havana constituency. While he preferred to talk to reporters about Cuba's ongoing battle to bring home shipwreck survivor Elian Gonzalez from the United States, his brother, Armed Forces Minister Raul Castro, delivered an uncompromising defense of the country's one-party communist system, which is consecrated in a 1976 constitution. "Fidel is not exaggerating when he says this is the best democracy in the world," Raul Castro, the No. 2 in the island's hierarchy who is viewed as Fidel's logical successor, said when he cast his vote in Havana. Despite the intense government propaganda campaign, there was little visible enthusiasm among Havana residents about the municipal polls, which offered no significant alteration to the island's political landscape. "These elections change nothing in Cuba," said Elizardo Sanchez, president of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a non-government group which monitors human rights and is viewed as illegal by the authorities. None of the island's small community of human rights activists and dissidents, which are routinely condemned and persecuted and often jailed by the government as U.S.-backed and financed "counter-revolutionaries," were known to have tried to stand as candidates in the local polls. Raul Castro justified the maintenance of the one-party system by saying: "If we created another party, it would be the 'Party of the Yankees' (the United States)." He said Washington constantly sought to use any political opposition on the island to undermine and overthrow one-party communist rule. He added there were not more than 1,000 government opponents in the whole country. "We have one party and that is what we will continue to have," Raul Castro said. President Castro has launched a diplomatic and propaganda counteroffensive against the foreign criticism. State TV has started broadcasting programs in which government commentators condemn alleged rights abuses in those nations, including several from Europe, which voted against Cuba in Geneva. news.lycos.com