• Cuban democracy, genuine, authentic – not imported – has a last name: socialist. Its essence lies in citizen participation, in the right of all people to take part in the economic, political and social construction of the nation.
"There is no democracy in Cuba," those who oppose the Cuban political system repeat over and over again. "How can there be with a single party?"
The question would have to be answered with another: who said that democracy means multiparty?
Democracy is, in all meanings of the term, government of the people. And we could add: by the people and for the people.
Multiparty is, with all due respect to most contemporary societies that consider it a guarantee of democracy, a fragmentation of the nation's political forces, with a supreme goal: to dispute power.
This is how the sense of service to the majorities is relegated and they themselves do not reach the candidacies.
Cuba cannot be measured under this criterion, because its electoral system was conceived, precisely, to overcome the limitations that traditional models have to favor the people's access to power.
But, it is not the purpose of this editorial to question the legitimacy of the electoral processes of other nations, nor to exalt our merits by denigrating others, since we would be making the same mistake as the many who, without knowing the Cuban electoral system, disqualify it for not to be a carbon copy of what they defend.
One truth must be told: Cuba has already known and practiced multiparty and the people have always lost in the fight between the parties. Cuba believes in the strength that the unity of millions of citizens around a single Party contributes to their needs and demands as a society.
By approving the local candidacies for our General Elections this Sunday, one of the most important processes of the political system that the nation has given itself is beginning, to guarantee the exercise of full democracy from citizen participation. Without it, democracy would be empty of content. It would be a dream.
On December 1st, 2022, the Council of State issued the call for national elections to elect, for a term of five years, the deputies who will represent us in the National Assembly of People's Power.
This highly transparent process will have an important moment on Sunday, March 26, when Cubans will go to the polls to exercise our right to a free, equal, direct, and secret vote. There we will be electing the supreme body of State power and, at the same time, reaffirming ourselves as actors in the country's politics.
The democracy that does not exist in Cuba is the one practiced by the society of capital, the one of the empire of money and influence, the one that tries to impose itself on all countries, without considering their history, traditions, and social and political organization.
In the models that claim to be democratic per se, whoever invests the millionaire amounts raised in unequal campaigns "with more efficiency" usually wins, whoever buys more spaces in the media concert, whoever pours the most mud on their rivals, whoever makes the most promises.
Cuban democracy, genuine, authentic – not imported – has a last name: socialist. Its essence lies in citizen participation, in the right of all people to take part in the economic, political and social construction of the nation.
No matter how much successive US administrations and the pawns at their service on social networks try to paint the world a Cuba with a rigid, authoritarian and failed government, the force of truth will always be greater than the ridiculous smear campaigns.
The electoral party that is beginning is an inseparable part of that truth that perhaps we have not been able to count on all its merits. It is perfectible, not perfect. Even in that it is more like us than all the models they want to sell us.