Raúl Castro is Cuba\'s top vote-getter

[Jimmy2]

CUBA

Raúl Castro is Cuba's top vote-getter

Posted on Wed, Jan. 30, 2008

BY FRANCES ROBLES

Cuba's interim leader, Raúl Castro, received the most votes in the Jan. 20 National Assembly elections, getting one percentage point more than his ailing brother Fidel, according to official results released Wednesday.

The Castro brothers both represent the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba in the nation's parliament. And like the other 612 assembly candidates, they ran unopposed.

The Cuban government lauds the elections as a true measure of civic activism, because 96 percent of Cuba's 8.2 million voters went to the polls.

Cuban election results show 95 percent of the ballots were valid; 3.46 percent were blank, and another 1.08 percent were nullified, the newspaper Granma reported. With 5 percent null or blank votes, the provinces of Holguín and Pinar del Río led the nation in invalid ballots.

''If there was a layer of opposition in Cuba, shouldn't that number be higher?'' said Andy Gómez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies. ``I think people bought into what they have been conditioned: to follow this process in fear that someone will check to see how they voted.''

Nearly all the voters cast ballots in favor of Raúl Castro, the defense minister who has been at the nation's helm since his brother fell ill in July 2006. Results show Raúl got 99.4 percent of the valid votes, while Fidel received 98.2 percent.

Despite the Cuban leadership's campaign for Cubans to vote for all 614 candidates in a united slate, the published results show that one candidate in Pinar del Río got 73 percent of the vote, and another in Isla de la Juventud got just 70 percent.

''If enough people did not vote for all the candidates, that's interesting to me,'' said Florida International University Professor Marifeli Pérez-Stable. ``It shows some degree of thinking.''

The assembly will meet Feb. 24 to select the Council of State and its president. For the first time, experts believe the winner could be someone other than Fidel Castro.

[tigger]

» ''If there was a layer of opposition in Cuba, shouldn't that number be

» higher?'' said Andy Gómez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami's

» Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies.

Uh Andy...

"Official" results given by authoritarian governments usually say exactly what they want them to say, and are not reliably indicative of what's really going on.

[brooklyn]

sound like a Milton Friedmanesque Republican election over here.:-|