Voting day to renew the Cuban National Assembly

(Havana) The Cuban power succeeded in mobilizing voters on Sunday to renew the National Assembly in an unsurprising ballot with 470 candidates for 470 seats, reversing the abstentionist trend of recent years after an unusual electoral campaign in this communist country .

The 23,648 polling stations closed at 7 p.m. local time (7 p.m. Eastern Time), an hour later than initially announced by election officials. The counting of the ballots began immediately.

According to the latest provisional figures available, at 5 p.m. the turnout, the only issue in the ballot, was 70.33%, according to the National Electoral Council, which did not specify when the final figure would be known. The results of the ballot are expected in the coming days.

However, this provisional participation rate is higher than the final rate of the most recent ballot: 68.5% in the municipal elections in November, which had represented a lowest since the establishment of the electoral system on the island in 1976.

In September, turnout was 74% in the referendum on the Family Code, and 90% for the referendum on the new Constitution in 2019.

In Cuba, voting is not compulsory, but opposition is prohibited.

Eight million Cubans were called upon to ratify the 470 candidates, 263 women and 207 men, mostly members of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC, unique), destined to occupy the 470 seats of the National Assembly of People’s Power for the five years in office. come.

Voters had two options on their ballot: ticking the name of one or more candidates in the constituency or ticking the “vote for all” option, which implies support for the 470 candidates and makes it possible to increase their legitimacy, each one having to obtain more 50% of the votes to be elected.

“I voted for all, because despite the needs, the difficulties that this country may have, I cannot conceive of giving my vote”, while abstaining, “to those who want to crush us, trample us, the Yankees!” Carlos Diego Herrera, 54, told AFP at a polling station in Havana, referring to the United States, which has imposed an embargo on the island since 1962.

” Mathematical ”

Among the 470 candidates, nominated by parliamentary and municipal commissions, include the president and first secretary of the PCC, Miguel Diaz-Canel, 62, and the former leader Raul Castro, 91.

“With the united vote (for all), we are defending the unity of the country, the unity of the revolution, our future, our socialist Constitution,” said Diaz-Canel, after voting in the city of Santa Clara , 280 km from Havana, where he is a candidate.

Several weeks before the election, the candidates, including the president, conducted an unprecedented field campaign in this country unaccustomed to electoral proselytism, to collect the grievances of voters.

The head of state has traveled to his hometown of Santa Clara no less than ten times to mobilize voters. The meetings between candidates and citizens were widely broadcast by state television.

This legislative election comes at a time when Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in 30 years, with galloping inflation and an unprecedented wave of migration, under the combined effect of the consequences of the pandemic, the strengthening of American sanctions and the country’s economic weaknesses. .

Deprived of candidates, the opposition had called for abstention on social networks.

Dissident Manuel Cuesta Morua, a member of the Council for Democratic Transition in Cuba, wrote on Twitter to be attentive to “the electoral mathematics of the government”.

“At 9 a.m., he says 18.2% of the electorate has voted. At 11 a.m., 41.66%. This means that in less than two hours the participation has increased by 23.46%. Impossible ! The polling stations are empty,” denounced the opponent.

He later said that his house and that of another activist “were besieged” by state security, when they wanted to attend the counting at polling stations.

Before the end of 2023, Miguel Diaz-Canel, the first president to lead the country after the years of power of the brothers Fidel and Raul Castro, should be a candidate for re-election before the deputies for a second and final term according to the Constitution.