Neighborhood Spokespeople Launch a Proposal to Modify the Election Law / Silvio Benítez Márquez

This 26th of January a modest representation of Neighborhood Spokespeople met in the Havana locality of Punta Brava to officially launch a new citizen proposal. The proposal consists of proposing to the Cuban government that they change or modify the current Electoral Law.

This proposition of the Neighborhood Spokespeople is founded on the last intervention before the National Assembly of People’s Power of the General – President Raúl Castro, when he recognized some deficiencies and errors in the Cuban revolutionary process, leaving an enormous vacuum concerning who is or are truly guilty of the failed process.

As such, and in harmony with the renovating speech of the General, those who formed this proposal think that this is the best moment to build a new selection mechanism to elect our delegates from the base to the National Assembly.

A mechanism that would immediately break with something as ridiculous and absurd that has been imposed for 34 years, without the slightest shadow of a disclaimer, where to be elected as a candidate only one’s individual attributes or merits are considered; obviating the theory that to vote for someone one must know first how the person thinks and how he might definitively behave when it is time to legislate were he to become a parliamentarian.

The minimalist proposal of the Neighborhood Spokespeople would be implemented in two working phases. The first, the participation in a debate of the economic and social guidelines in the neighborhood with the goal of making public the petition of modifying the Electoral Law. And the second, dedicated completely to collecting signatures throughout the island with the goal of presenting them as a National Demand before the Cuban parliament.

It is also worth mentioning that the efforts of various Neighborhood Spokespeople who on the even of deciding to give the document to the State Council and the National Assembly, considering that decades of restrictions and absolutism had been used in the past to support the General-President against the Assembly.

Punta Brava, 2 February 2011
By Silvio Benítez Márquez
Promoter of the project Voices of the Neighborhood
Ave 249 4614 % 46 Y 48 Punta Brava, la Lisa.
Mobile – 052541300

February 7 2011