The one-party system in Cuba is a legitimate response to unrelenting US aggression against the Cuban people. It has been well documented by Philip Agee and others how the CIA and its various front organizations have routinely corrupted multi-party elections, bankrolling their own candidates, and used local, privately owned mass media to attack their opponents with lies and disinformation. They also infiltrate and seek to control unions and students' groups in a bid to make the target country ungovernable through strikes, demonstrations and riots. The Cuban people simply have too much to lose to allow these agents to operate with impunity within their borders. And one of the principle ways to fight back is through its system of socialist, one-party democracy that seems to balance the need to maintain vigilance and unity in the face of the imperialist onslaught with the need for a fully accountable government.
The so-called dissident movement that promotes multi-party elections, is widely seen in Cuba a tool of US imperialism. As former head of the US Interest Section in Havana, Wayne Smith (1) has put it:
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.
In a 1975 referendum, in a remarkable show of unity, 96% of eligible Cuban voters endorsed a new constitution which enshrined in law a democratic, socialist, one-party system. It is this unity that has enabled Cuba to not only survive the US onslaught, but to maintain what is widely regarded as the best health care and education systems in Latin America--this in spite of the collapse of its main trading partner, the former USSR and the intensified US embargo. This overwhelming unity of purpose was displayed more recently in the national elections of 1993, 1998 and 2003.
There are, of course, some risks associated with a one-party system, risks that the Cuban constitution and electoral tradition seek to minimize. To this end, a representative democracy has been instituted where:
Cuba could, of course, be more democratic still. Significant inroads in this area, however, may be all but impossible, besieged, as Cuba is, by that belligerent superpower to its north. This, in fact, is an opinion shared by most Cuban dissidents themselves! They have stated clearly on number of occasions, for example, that they believe that the US embargo on Cuba is, in the words of leading dissident Elizardo Sanchez, "an impediment to reforms."
Nevertheless, no other national electoral system, multiparty or otherwise, can boast of all of the above essential aspects of a real democracy. And what would seem to be some necessary restrictions on political activities are based on an overwhelming consensus of the Cuban people as indicated by election results (and even by reports from the CIA itself!). So, far from being a factor limiting democracy, the one-party system seems to have enabled Cuba to evolve into a higher form of democracy that rivals that found anywhere else for its responsiveness to the working-class majority.
1. Hernando Calvo and Katlijn Declercq, The Cuban Exile Moment, Dissidents or Mercenaries, p. 156, Ocean Press, 2000
2. Arnold August, Democracy in Cuba and the 1997-98 Elections, Editorial Jose Marti, 1999