Cuba: The People Choose their Representatives

In every corner of the country, candidates are being nominated and elected to posts as delegates on municipal assemblies. These assemblies are roughly equivalent to local councils in other countries.

Electoral commissions already updated the registers of voters that will be published, as the first step towards the municipal assembly ballots on April 25. All citizens with the right to vote will have the chance to check that their records are correct, that there are no errors, omissions or changes in their details.  

This information is posted publicly to avoid electoral fraud, removing some of the obstacles that are common in other countries that stop citizens exercising their right to vote.  

It is worth highlighting that these rights existed in Cuba before the revolution. As the president of the National Assembly of the People's Power, Ricardo Alarcon, has also pointed out, the universal and automatic right that all Cubans are born, to register to vote without cost, dates back to the Cuban republic-in-arms.  

It was US intervention in 1898 that put restrictions on this right, specifying that voters had to have a certain level of education and income, which meant that only seven percent of the population was able to vote in the 1900 elections. 

The process currently taking place, whereby candidates are being nominated at neighbourhood meetings, is one of the details that most distinguishes Cuba's electoral system. In other countries, candidates are put forward by political parties, chosen essentially by the competition between parties and candidates. 

In Cuba however the people decide who is going to represent them. The Communist Party, which manages society and the state, is not an electoral organization. 

The current process will see more than 50 thousand neighbourhood meetings take place in over 15 thousand electoral districts in the countries 169 municipalities. In the 2007 elections, 50,760 neighbourhood meetings put forward 37,328  candidates. 

These men and women will represent the views of the population that elected them, because the population can also remove them from their posts at any time.