BY GABRIEL MOLINA
HAVANA — A dispatch from the EFE news agency in July confirmed that a new method of producing the UN report on human development has resulted in Cuba being placed "among the world's least democratic countries, comparable with nations such as Libya, China and Belarus".
According to EFE, this version of the report tries to present an alternative to merely economic criteria for measuring development, offering new parameters for the classification of democracy.
"The report specifies that Cuba enjoys the minimum of civil liberties (registering seven points alongside Saudi Arabia or Equatorial Guinea) on a scale where the most democratic country registers one point, and an equally negative grading on political rights", the dispatch adds.
Nevertheless, it does concede that Cuba came 55th (out of 178 countries) with regard to stability and absence of violence, and compared to other Latin American nations. It also acknowledged that Cuban indices of human development, life expectancy, 96.7% adult literacy and an infant mortality rate of seven per 1000 live births are much higher than other countries in the region.
Likewise highlighted is the fact that in Cuba's last parliamentary elections, held in 1998, 98% of the population voted. Likewise, 27.6% of the island's deputies are women, a figure higher than Spain and well above any other nation in the region.
Those figures alone are an impeccable expression of democracy, reflecting the nation's quality of life and acknowledging its social achievements. Nevertheless, EFE says that the island emerged with seven points in the section on democracy in general, with Saudi Arabia heading the list of the most authoritarian countries at 10 points.
At any rate, we are accustomed to such interpretations. What is unusual and significant on the international scene is this apparent change of direction in development reports. For it affirms that only 57% of nations are "wholly democratic in guaranteeing human rights and institutions such as a free press and independent judicial powers".
In an introductory note, the report decrees: "Democracy has been demonstrated as being the most suitable system of government for mediating in and preventing conflicts, as well as the most capable of guaranteeing and preserving well-being." But it does not specify what kind of democracy it is referring to.
If we are to be guided by the speech by Mark Mallet Brown, administrator of the UN Development Program (UNDP) in Manila at the presentation of the report, he admitted: "More than 60 of the world's countries are poorer now than they were 10 years ago. In some countries, the situation has begun to disillusion people in terms of democracy itself; almost half of the new wave of governments, in theory the fruit of election, still cannot consider themselves fully democratic."
For the report's central message, the capable presenter picked up an idea that the UNDP has always maintained: in order to promote efficient human development, policies must be centred on eradicating poverty. But there is a clear contradiction in what is being said now and that raison d'etre.
The shots are directed against the developing countries, and especially against Cuba. This is demonstrated by using the same arguments that the United States deployed, with brutal threats and blackmail, to win a narrow margin of approval at the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
The report questions elections and freedom of the press in Cuba, as if neither existed. Democracy and freedom are beautiful words that are not the exclusive patrimony of the US model of market democracy. Many crimes like those in Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan have been committed in its name.
Democracy in Cuba
But there is nothing better than one day after another. On May 20, President George Bush himself admitted something that he and his predecessors have always overlooked. Compelled by the growing belief in the US Congress that the policy of warfare against Cuba has been a failure for 40 years, Bush has accepted what is being cooked up there in relation to the island's 2003 elections: that they should be sanctified by an external commission.
Seven years ago, the National Assembly of People's Power in Cuba decided that its deputies should be elected by means of a direct vote, and candidates are not nominated by political parties. Nominations are made in a more democratic manner. Electors meeting in assemblies in each neighbourhood discuss the merits of those worthy of representing them in the National Assembly and make their decision.
Money has no role in Cuban elections, neither in terms of the election process nor the remuneration of deputies. The island endured 60 years of disastrous experiences with camarillas organised into so-called political parties.
Washington's response to that government reform was the Helms-Burton Act, whose Title II grants the US Congress the faculty of defining when and if the Cuban government is or is not democratic.
The more developed countries have less threats to defend themselves against, but that is not the case in Cuba, on which the US has virtually declared war and is applying laws related to trading with the enemy that date back to 1918. Defensive measures on the island are benign in comparison to those adopted in similar circumstances by other states. Remember the McCarthy era.
For many people, market democracy is an example to impose on the world. That model, moreover, was terribly exposed in the 2000 presidential elections in the US. Discounting the endemic evil of a democracy that demanded a record cost of US$3 billion in campaign funds for those elections, Al Gore received 500,000 votes more than George Bush throughout the nation as a whole.
And if the Florida votes had been recounted, he would have beaten Bush there as well. But the electoral system in force allows a candidate to win an election on fewer votes than his opponent.
There is talk of reform, but really it is the whole system that needs to be changed, given for example, that the way in which funds are collected to defray election costs, including presidential ones, has given rise to disgraceful but admitted compromises.
America's racist plutocracy
The last presidential elections beat all records. A few hours after the Florida poll, calls from people of colour complaining that they had not been allowed to vote flooded in to the headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Baltimore.
There were claims that polling stations in university cities with a large enrolment of black students opened late or not at all. Others affirmed that employees in the polling stations prevented them from voting because their names didn't appear on the voting lists although they had valid registration cards.
There were also complaints from people who were refused their right to vote because their names incorrectly appeared on a list of persons with a criminal record. Florida is one of many states to deny those convicted of serious charges the right to vote, even after they have served their sentences and been released.
In one district of Florida, state police set up barriers in the vicinity of a polling station heavily used by black voters. The authorities stopped vehicles travelling to those stations and interrogated the occupants.
On occasions, such encounters between police officers and African Americans can turn ugly. One of the most notorious incidents occurred when New York police arrested a Haitian immigrant whom they accused of fighting in a bar. Officers took the man to the police precinct bathroom and shoved a broom handle into his anus, which they subsequently inserted into his mouth covered with his faeces.
Many incidents such as this, and a long list of others that have resulted in inexplicable shootings of, and injuries to, black people by police agents made African-American voters leave the area of the polling stations when they saw the police barriers.
One third of the close to 23,000 voting slips disqualified in four counties were concentrated in areas with a large black population, according to an analysis in Fort Lauderdale's Sun Sentinel. That daily stated that close to 18,000 of those votes would probably have been for Gore, who was trailing Bush in Florida by a mere 537 votes, not counting his national advantage of more than 500,000 votes.
After a legal battle between the two parties, Gore conceded the presidency to Bush on December 13, 36 days after the elections and after the US Supreme Court ruled against a needed manual recount of thousands of disputed votes in Florida.
In those elections, Bush was not elected, but selected by his five buddies among the nine Supreme Court judges.
Bush has demonstrated the scant respect he has for the much-praised tripartite state power system. In the face of Senate opposition, in January he appointed Eugene Scalia and Otto Reich as undersecretary of justice and assistant secretary of state for Western hemispherical affairs, respectively.
With the appointment of Reich who, as ambassador to Venezuela, contributed to terrorist Posada Carriles' escape from prison in that country, Bush settled part of his debt to Cuban-American National Foundation, given that the role of the police and officials in control there was decisive to the result, as they proclaimed in Miami.
In relation to Scalia, the debt was a larger one: he is the son of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court judge whose vote decided Bush's presidency.
In the wake of that state of affairs, there is no moral justification for US observance of elections in any country, or for its imposition of a market democracy and fragments of freedom.
[Abridged from Granma Internacional .]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, September 25, 2002.
Visit the