Much to the dismay of tiny, yet well-financed dissident groups in Cuba, it is impossible to buy an election, US-style. Not surprisingly then, most of them are proposing a return to a US-style, money-based electoral system. They will have a hard time getting elected on such a platform for a number of reasons: First, judging by the election results, the Cuban people fully support their own unique form of representative democracy which can be seen to be free of the influence of money and party politics.
The so-called dissident movement, to the extent that they are noticed at all in Cuba, are seen a tool of US imperialism. That this is the case, is confirmed by none other than former head of the US Interest Section in Havana, Wayne Smith (1):
We [in the USA] aren't really interested in democracy and human rights. We just use those words to hide our true reasons....
Since 1985, we have stated publicly that we will encourage and openly finance dissident and human rights groups in Cuba; this, too, is in our interests. The United States isn't financing all those groups--only the ones that are best known internationally.
Those dissidents and human rights groups in Cuba--that are nothing but a few people--are only important to the extent that they serve us in a single cause: that of destabilizing Fidel Castro's regime.
Secondly, in an electoral system like Cuba's in which no candidate is to have an advantage because access to funding or other such advantage unrelated to personal merit, there must be strict controls on all aspects of political campaigning during and between elections. It is impossible to simply "buy air-time" for anything resembling a political campaign outside the tightly controlled, grassroots-based electoral process. There is nothing undemocratic about this -- quite the contrary. It is, I believe, a legitimate response to the corrupting influence that money has often had on the democratic process -- a problem which no other representative democracy seems to have addressed quite so effectively.The Cuban people want to exclude party politics from their electoral system. They want to nominate their own candidates at the grassroots level. And they do not want to have to raise millions of dollars just to run for public office.
The US embargo -- but a part of a long of history US aggression against Cuba -- has not helped matters either. Even members of Cuba's tiny dissident movement concur on this. This was clear from an article by Elizardo Sanchez in the New York Times, April 22, 1997. He wrote:
The vast majority of us on the island who oppose the Government believe that a dialogue and a relaxation of tensions between the United States and Cuba would better facilitate a transformation [of Cuban society]. Unfortunately, the Helms-Burton Act [the legislative cornerstone of the embargo], which among other things mandates sanctions against foreign companies that do business in Cuba, makes it very difficult for the United States to take part in such a dialogue.
Two years later, they explicitly called for an immediate and unconditional lifting of the embargo. This was clear from the U.S. press coverage of the recent visit to Cuba of Illinois Governor Ryan. On October 26, 1999, The Chicago Tribune reported:
While Ryan did hear about human-rights violations during the meeting [with prominent Cuban dissidents at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana], it was the pleas for ending the long U.S. embargo against Cuba--what Castro also wants-- that clearly made an impression on the governor. ...
A frustrated Elizardo Sanchez, perhaps the most prominent dissident in Cuba, was quoted in the same article as saying, "All the bad things here [in Cuba] are blamed on Washington, that there are no jobs, no shoes, no food, no medicines." He, of course, claims it is the Cuban government's fault, but the Cuban people, by his own admission, aren't buying it. (Neither, apparently, are the UN General Assembly and countless other international forums – as indicated by their many votes condemning the embargo.)
In the Tribune article, as well, we have confirmation of the deep distrust, even among the dissidents themselves, of the motives the US and its Cuban "government-in-waiting" in Miami:
"Miami's longtime Cuban exiles base their continued support of the embargo"on their own self-interest," [Manuel David] Corrio [a prominent Cuban dissident] said. With hopes of regaining large land and property holdings lost to Cuba's revolution, the exiles have "very clear, obvious economic interests" and are not focused on what is best for the island, he charged.
It shouldn't be surprising then that the Cuban opposition isn't making much headway in the hearts-and-minds department. This is confirmed by a recent NBC News report, CIA: Most Cubans loyal to homeland. In this report, an unspecified US official states that the opposition movement in Cuba is very small indeed -- 100 activists and perhaps a support group of 1000 more -- and that it has almost no support among the Cuban public.
1. Hernando Calvo and Katilijn Declercq, The Cuban Dissident Movement, Dissidents or Mercenaries, p. 156, Ocean Press, 2000