My objections to the coming elections

By Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera

HAVANA – There are some who describe them as a comedy, because they are elections dominated by a single party, something that can create a unanimity whose greatest design is to safeguard the established power, i.e., the system.

That’s true. But that occurs not only where there is a single party. Almost the entire so-called “democratic” world – to which we do not belong – is ruled by a two-party system that greatly resembles the one established a long time ago in the United States. You can vote for the Republicans or the Democrats, and sometimes there is a difference, yes, sir.

During his first term, President Barack Obama defrauded a great many of the people who voted for him. There was no immigration reform, the taxes are still paid by the poorest majorities. Thousands of Americans fill the ranks of “the indignant ones” who proliferate in those countries. But the neoliberal decision to trim social expenditures, reduce government payrolls, and increase unprotected unemployment cannot be controlled by the voters.

Politicians lie brazenly. Mariano Rajoy lied to his voters when he offered them a government program that was the opposite of the one he’s leading now, after obtaining the Spaniards’ naive vote. But if the socialists again rise to power, they’re not going to do much differently: democracy has been kidnapped by wealth. The voter who doesn’t vote but bankrolls the million-dollar political campaigns decides how the government will act. Underneath the two parties is the party of money. All things considered, bipartisanship is not useless.

Faced with the program of Mitt Romney, who threatened to be a second George W. Bush, the same defrauded voters chose to give Obama a second chance. The lesser of two evils. Even the Cubans in Dade County voted the Democratic ticket to foil the millionaire who came to forbid them to travel to Cuba and send money to their families.

To begin to restore the old democracy that wealth has been swallowing, one would have to forbid the million-dollar contributions to election campaigns that turn politicians into debtors of the wealthy minority, not of the considerably more modest majority that has voted for them.

In Cuba, we not only have no funding of political campaigns but we also have no political campaigns – maybe because they were associated with that deformity called “politicking.” The candidate promised what he knew he couldn’t do. Like Rajoy in Spain, he swindled the votes.

However, to eliminate political campaigning to eliminate politicking is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I might be interested in a person’s trajectory, in his personal integrity: in Cuba, all candidates usually have an irreproachable life trajectory. That is why I would like to know more about what a candidate plans to do as a deputy, what are his (her) projects as a legislator – and that is something I don’t know about the candidates I will elect. There should be a way for that information to be conveyed to the voters.

The chairwoman of the National Commission on Candidacies said in a recent TV program that a deputy is elected by a municipality or a province, but he legislates for the whole country. But that globalization of the legislation can annul a specific legislation. The deputy should know the ills, the shortages, the needs of his region and people, and should bring them forward at the place where he legislates.

The scant or almost nonexistent attention Cubans pay to their legislators arises from the fact that the latter cannot solve the problems that affect, and sometimes overwhelm, the citizens, the population.

Each level – the municipality, the province, the nation – should have a budget that should be global in the last resort but that should be specified in the province and the municipality. Let the deputy legislate for the nation, yes, but make sure he knows who elected him, what their problems are and what resources he has to solve them. It is absurd to have a deputy for Sagua de Tánamo who hasn’t visited that place for one year. If that link works, we’ll see how the communication between the legislator and his voters increases. The decentralization demanded loudly by the economy is urgently needed by the political life of the nation.

I also believe that the elections are not fully elections when the population must elect the same number of candidates being proposed. That’s what is happening now and, in practice, it is the Commission for Candidacies that is electing the deputies. It is true that each candidacy must be validated by the National Assembly. But, in order to add a new name, the Assembly must invalidate one of the proposed names, and there are seldom any weighty reasons to do that. What the Commission elects is the candidacy: if the voter doesn’t have someone to select, the Commission then decides how the Assembly will be formed.

I do not believe in the absolute separation of powers, as conceived by the illustrious French thinker Charles Louis de Montesquieu in his masterpiece, “The Spirit of the Laws,” published in 1748. But you can’t be judge and party, and it seems to me that 50 percent of the deputies included in the candidacy are excessive, since in fact most of them are government functionaries.

I think that diminishes the critical capacity of the National Assembly to evaluate the government’s performance. The National Assembly should include a group of important functionaries from the executive branch but also of personalities with proven prestige and without a commitment to the government, even though they may be members of the Communist Party of Cuba.

I think that adopting these measures would notably enhance the democratic nature of our elections and consequently reinforce the ties between the population and its representatives. It would be good for us.