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Towards the re-election of Miguel Díaz-Canel

2023-04-09T14:22:25.239Z


The recent legislative elections open the way for the re-election of the Cuban president, but they do so with various symptoms of loss of popularity


Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel at the last Ibero-American Summit. Mónica González Islas

Very soon, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel will celebrate five years in power.

A power underestimated by multiple currents of opinion, favorable or adverse to the Government of the island.

According to many, Díaz-Canel would be a puppet ruler of the historic generation or the hard core of the Cuban military and political elite.

He himself has reiterated that his mandate is governed by continuity.

The recent legislative elections open the way for Díaz-Canel's re-election, but they do so with various symptoms of loss of popularity.

Compared to those of 2018, abstention grew from 14% to 24% and the divided or selective vote, that is, not for all official candidates, went from 19% to almost 28%.

If we add to this the slight increase in blank or annulled votes, it is easy to conclude that, although the National Assembly retains its monolithism, the public has shown discontent.

Díaz-Canel began to govern shortly after Barack Obama's trip to the island and the death of Fidel Castro, in 2016. The political line that followed his mandate was drawn at the seventh congress of the Communist Party, in April of that year, which it put brakes on the economic reform promoted by Raúl Castro in previous years, which had facilitated the reestablishment of relations between the United States and Cuba.

Díaz-Canel came to power in the midst of a counter-reform turn that alternated the containment of the non-state sector of the economy, the increase in control of civil society, the relaunch of the Bolivarian axis in Latin America, and the attack by the official media on “ centrism”, that is, the Cuban reformism of the period of the Obama thaw.

That shift, based on an official diagnosis of the "subversive" capacity of diplomatic normalization with the United States, was the immediate legacy that he received from Fidel Castro, the new president.

The counter-reformist line would very soon have the opportunity to manifest itself in the final draft of the 2019 Constitution, which left out of the text many demands for political change raised in citizen consultations, such as the direct election of the president of the republic.

Díaz-Canel himself, indirectly elected, ended up promoting a Constitution far from various transforming expectations of the majority of citizens.

Before the approval of the constitutional text, the Government promoted a series of decrees, such as 349, 371 and the National Symbols Law, which tried to limit freedom of expression in public spaces, alternative media and social networks.

The control offensive generated conflicts between the Ministry of Culture and the younger generation of Cuban artists, as could be seen in the harassment of the San Isidro Movement and the protest on November 27, 2020 in Vedado.

The restrictions on travel and remittances adopted by the new Administration of Donald Trump, added to errors in Cuban economic policy, such as the monetary and exchange unification of early 2021, in full expansion of the coronavirus pandemic, generated a perfect storm in the island society.

The shortages, shortages and rises in the prices of basic products, lack of fuel and electricity cuts added to a growing and widespread discontent that caused tens of thousands of Cubans to take to the streets to protest on July 11 and 12, 2021. .

Díaz-Canel's immediate reaction was to declare that "the order to combat had been given", calling on the "revolutionaries" to confront the "counterrevolutionaries" in the town squares.

The social outbreak was officially interpreted as an act of sedition incorporated into a coup attempt promoted by the US government and the media and social networks of the Miami diaspora and the island's opposition.

Thousands of people were arrested in the months following July 11 and more than a thousand have been sentenced to terms ranging from 5 to 30 years in prison.

In the midst of the processes against the demonstrators, the Cuban State unveiled a new Penal Code, which increased to 24 the crimes for which a citizen can be sentenced to death, and increased the penalties for "attempted change the constitutional order” and for “external financing”, charges that are imputed in the media to opponents and activists, without necessarily receiving legal action.

Unlike the Criminal Code, a new Family Code, which makes the rights of same-sex couples more flexible and deepens the gender approach, was submitted to a referendum at the end of 2022, obtaining the support of more than 66% of those consulted.

The two codes, criminal and family, fully portray the first five years of Díaz-Canel's government: repression and control of civil society, limited advances in civil rights and setbacks in economic and political freedoms.

In recent months, the world has seen scandalized how hundreds of Nicaraguan opponents and activists have been released and deported.

This type of exchange, prison for exile, has been practiced in Cuba for decades.

Arrested or prosecuted, like many of those who left to march peacefully in the summer of 2021, they have had to leave the island, as part of the largest mass exodus in recent decades.

Just last year, some 270,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States.

If Cuba were a democracy, as the official Havana press maintains, these five years would be the central topic of debate in the island's state media.

In a few months, the president must be re-elected, for five more years, in the highest leadership of the Cuban State and, later, in that of the single communist party.

That this re-election is taken for granted, after such a repressive and continuous first five-year period, could not be a better indication of the lack of democracy in the Caribbean nation.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-04-09

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