Cuba’s leadership votes – there are 470 candidates for 470 seats

On Sunday, there were exactly 470 candidates for 470 seats, which were pre-approved by state committees – only the Communist Party is allowed in Cuba. The candidates are each guaranteed more than 50 percent of the vote and therefore a term of office of five years. Only voter turnout, which was always very high in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, seemed really open, but has been lower lately. The first results were expected on Monday.

For more than a year now, Cuba has been experiencing what is probably the largest wave of emigration since the revolution in the 1950s. To what extent this and the economic crisis in the country would affect the mobilization of some eight million voters was initially unclear after Sunday’s vote.

Dissidents had called for people not to go to the polls to protest against the pseudo-democratic vote. The government promoted the possibility of voting for all candidates in a constituency at once by marking a large circle in the center of the ballot paper. The state portrays the one-party system as true democracy because it promotes unity.

The National Assembly, Cuba’s only parliamentary chamber, elects the president from among its ranks. In all likelihood, Miguel Díaz-Canel will be re-elected. By 2018, he had risen to the top of the state, becoming the first ruler since the 1959 revolution who did not come from the Castro family, which is inextricably linked to Cuba’s history.

One of the candidates for parliament was 29-year-old Elián González, whose fate touched the world after he was rescued from the sea off the coast of Florida at the age of five in late 1999. His mother drowned trying to flee to the United States, and after months of fighting between the two countries, Gónzalez eventually returned to his father in Cuba.

Many Cubans are dissatisfied with the state’s institutions because of its great lack and are punishing them by not voting, González told state media on Sunday. However, the problem does not lie with the government, but with the US embargo against Cuba. (sda/dpa)