Category: Manuel Cuesta Morua

Electoral Integrity is, roughly, a concept that allows us to analyze elections from a conception that goes beyond the day of the vote. We observe the conditions of electoral competition, the degree of independence of the agencies involved in the process, the level of independence and freedom of citizens to elect and to be elected, the role of the press, respect for human rights, the balance of participation among candidates and, of course, the process itself starting from the call for elections through counting the votes and releasing the results, as well as all the logistical conditions.

Electoral Integrity goes to the quality of the process. It precedes the elections, follows them, and follows up post-election, looking at how citizens perceive the process itself. This concept holds that electoral systems are perfectible. A system is not a permanent given, rather every system has to evolve, readjust to technological conditions, and – this is fundamental – respond to changes in context. The main thing is the quality of representation and the clarity of the elections.

The idea is dying, therefore, that good elections are reduced to participation, calm, competition and transparency on the day of the vote.

Based on this concept, I was able to observe that the elections in Peru began long before they were called, at the end of 2015.

I was in Trujillo, the most important center of La Libertad region, in the north of Peru. In the National Organization of Electoral Processes (ONPE) I observed closely the well-oiled electoral architecture for the elections convened this April. I talked to the judges of the National Elections Board (JNE) and with the Organization of Electoral Processes, responsible for overseeing voting and ensuring the necessary logistics.

Voting is compulsory, with corresponding fines for those who do not turn out, but I noticed more civic engagement than fear of harm to one’s purchasing power. Fines respond, in any case, to social classes: 29 soles (the official currency) for the poorest, 90 for the middle classes, and 193 for economically privileged sectors. Probably 29 soles could be very important for the 20% in the lowest band of Peruvian society; however, 80% of the more than 23 million Peruvians who took to the polls could easily pay a fine, for them symbolic, to punish the system.

From here I drew a first conclusion: democracy is a civic virtue in Peru, despite the remnants of political violence. We attended a crowded rally at the end of the Pedro Pablo Kuczynski campaign. The participation of thousands of his followers was a sign that democratic conviction is probably more important than the political and communications capacity, and perhaps the vision, of their leaders.

I noticed that the leadership of the parties responds to the leadership and civic engagement of Peruvians, a fact that solidifies the soil of democracy in that country, although one should not lose the perspective of the importance and value of political leadership in democracy. My doubt arose from whether the presidential candidates shared the stature of their citizens.

A second condition of Electoral Integrity is thus satisfied: the political space for the civic expression of citizens. This is a substantial element to strengthen the relationship between civil society, the citizenry and political parties: electoral transparency.

The behavior of the press is the third essential element for Electoral Integrity. El Comercio, La Republica and Peru 21 , despite their clear backing for one candidate or another, covered the development of the day with good objectivity. The same happened with television. There was a balance in the treatment of candidates and plurality in editorial treatments, with arguments for all ideological tastes.

Peru voted. And, as the daily La Republica headlined on its front page on Monday the 11^th, the voters turned to the right. Adding the votes obtained by Keiko Fujimori (40%), Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (22%) and Alan Garcia (6%), shows that more than 67% of Peruvians voted for continuity while Veronika Mendoza , the candidate of the Frente Amplio (the Left) received only 18% of the votes.

The runoff between Fujimori and Kuczynski, on 5 June, will define the course of Peru for the next five years.

The distance of 16 years between the Revolutionary event and its political institutionalization established and stabilized a particular habit that is typical of pre-modern politics: command by those who triumphed. And the triumph was one of a party above a nation. And so, before 1976, there was the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1975, which was the year when those few who came to dominate the destiny of everyone were institutionalized.

The Communist Party is the origin of the 1976 Constitution. It goes without saying that the origins of the Cuban Constitution were anything but democratic. Its conception and drafting were not the work of a group of notables chosen for their diversity and representative of society, but a rather of a small appointed group consisting of militants of the old Socialist Party, specifically directed to copy the outline of the Bulgarian Constitution from the Socialist era, which in turn was a facsimile of the Soviet Constitution of 1936.

Thus, Cuba backtracked almost four years, if we take 1940 – the year Cuba’s pre-Revolution Constitution had been adopted – as a point of departure for a rich constitutional history that responded to the foundations of a modern constitutional state: limitation of power, fundamental freedoms and separation of powers.

Without prior public consultation, the 1976 Constitution inverts sovereignty and crystalizes two sovereign dimensions over society. In this it exceeds, so to speak, the socialist world that it imitates and where it constantly seeks legitimacy. The inverted sovereignty makes it clear to everyone that the source of law for the acts of the Government is not in the people but at the top of the pyramid: in those who rule in their name. The double dimension of this recovery of the concept of sovereignty that precedes the French Revolution warns us that above us is the Communist ideology and above it, and everything else, including international law, is the Revolution, the source of law in Cuba.

The history of the country over the past 57 years is one of tension between the hegemony of the Communists and the hegemony of the Revolutionaries who are active in the Communist Party and who, owners of everything, rule outside of them and the constitution they copied.

But there are two other basic tensions: that which occurs between the Revolutionaries and the country in which they reign, combining caprice and hormones; and that which is born from the clash between the will of the powers-that-be, and constitutional life.

These two tensions push sporadic reforms and counter-reforms of the Constitution to adapt to social and economic reality, that resists the structural and systematic blows of power, and the needs of survival in the face of this same reality. The 1992 reforms, reasserting the secular character of the Constitution and national sovereignty are in the first sense an adaptation. They were reforms to the extent that they put an end to official atheism, a form of State religion, and deleted the article that thanked the former Soviet Union for the very existence of the Cuban State.

In 2002 there was the counter-reform that once again evidenced the dominion of Revolutionaries with card-carrying Communist credentials. To any doctrinaire Communist, not to mention the rest of society that was emerging in all its plurality, it declared the irreversible character of socialism at the exact moment when evidence suggested the complete contrary. Nothing was irreversible nor had history come to an end: neither that proclaimed by the Communist Manifesto of 1848, nor that proclaimed by the American intellectual Francis Fukuyama in 1980 in his book The End of History and the Last Man.

The 2002 counter-reform indicated, however, a more important fact: the Cuban Revolution managed to institutionalize itself as habit precisely because it denies the constitutional life of the country. Cuban has been governed since 1976 in the same way it was in the 16 years between 1959 and 1976: by force of will and wishful thinking. This seems to tell us that the fundamental and necessary changes in the country can only be achieved through the triumph of another revolution.

Is this advisable? In my view, no. Someone said it superbly: The ends are nothing, the means are everything.

Cuban society has come to maturity through the blows of failures and there is already awareness, across all of society, that the country’s progress will be associated with clear and precise rules of the game that avail everyone and that are above everyone in the sense only that no one is above them.

The Constitutional Consensus project, promoted by various organizations of civil society and politically independent emerged from this awareness. For it what is essential it to define the what before the who and to return sovereignty to its only legitimate owners: the citizens. A prosperous and sustainable country can only grow within clear rules. Also moving in this direction are the proposals of the Cuba Possible project and the Coexistence project.

Similarly, the #Otro18 (Alternative Cuba 2018) project does the same, specifying and seeking to recover sovereignty through civil proposals for a new Electoral Law that guarantees plural participation without mediation of all Cuban citizens, leaving behind the single political subject recognized and legitimized by the powers-that-be: the revolutionary.

Important constitutional reforms of at least four articles of the Constitution are key to move in this direction. These are:

Article 3: Which has to do with the exercise of sovereignty and in which, for these involuntary derivations of the popular rhetoric, it is recognized that the people can exercise direct political power;

Article 5: Which awards hegemonic and implicit superiority to the Communist Party, whose reform extends to;

Article 62: Conceived to limit the exercise of the few recognized citizen rights, and;

Article 137: Which clearly defines the legal subjects with the capacity to reform the Constitution, and specifically excludes the citizens from this capacity.

These constitutional articles taken as a whole proportion the typical shielding of the State from society and the citizenry, and reveal the conceptual distortions in the contractual nature that are at the origins and foundations of constitutional law.

The Cuban government has realized that a profound constitutional reform is necessary. It has raised, on several occasion, that it is working on it, and is doing so clearly behind the backs of the citizens, as it develops a proposal for a new electoral law.

Unfortunately, 40 years later, the same spirit prevails: power is attempting an adjusted reform of its measure without prior public deliberation. A weak logic for the institutional future of the country.

Upon my arrival I was quickly driven to the House of the People in Oviedo: an exquisite and well-preserved example of the architecture of the 18th century which once served as a home for Catholic nuns and now is home to the PSOE. Being held there, and this is the first lesson for us, was the most fortunate of those typically boring meetings we humans commonly hold. It was the usual meeting, prior to the election cycle, of the different political groups among what they call auditors and guardians: a troop of party members who, on election day, monitor the transparency and fairness of the process.

The meeting included: a rereading the manual updated for the elections; a recounting of the incidents and problems associated with previous elections (the municipal elections held in May throughout Spain); a reminder, in the case of old auditors and guardians, and guidance in the case of new ones, of their duties and rights on the election day; a discussion in detail of what constitutes, according to the code, an electoral offense; and the locations of the local polling stations, among the total of 23,000 to be opened in throughout Spain. All of this was part of the necessarily boring night meeting in one of the PSOE headquarters. I learned there that this also was taking place among the other political parties.

This boredom of this process is a fortunate thing for a political exercise as important and complicated as elections. We should grasp the need for it because it is the only way to tackle one of the key axes of democratic systems: the nervousness that spreads among the political class faced with the uncertainties of citizens’ votes.

The second lesson is that, when it comes to elections in pluralistic system, we must be prepared for surprises. It is not always what you expect, whether it is the trends that mark traditions, or the currents expressed in opinion polls, that do or do not coincide with what happens in reality. In the 20-D elections there were several surprises: a clear end of bipartisanship — that is the dominance of two major parties; the emergence of new parties in Congress (Podemos and Ciudadanos); the dissolution of the arrogant majorities; and a return to the culture of dialogue and agreement needed to advance public policies.

The third lesson is that democracies cannot be hegemonic and respect the rights of minorities. One complaint I hear constantly is that majoritarian systems unleash the temptation to ignore the needs and interests of the minority, to manipulate the mass of voters and to turn the opposition into a noisy species unable to reverse pernicious decisions legitimated by the weight of the majority. Ultimately, and this is a modern element relevant to at least all Western countries, globalized societies are highly fragmented by a multitude of minorities – religious, political, ideological, ethnic or cultural – so that democracies should encourage coalitions that take into account the interests of all. For Cuba this lesson is urgent.

However, the most important lesson for us Cubans is the tolerance and respect for diversity displayed in a society like Spain’s, despite the bitter tone of political debate.

*Translator’s note: #Otro18 refers to the citizen’s initiative “AlternativaCuba2018”, which anticipates multiparty democratic elections in Cuba in 2018, the year in which Raul Castro has announced he will step down as president.

– Economic: The structure of the Cuban economy is not compatible with the American economy. Goods and services that Cuba could offer are not in the “market basket” of the American citizen, and, with regards to what Cuba could receive from the United States, which is everything, there is no Cuban monetary or wage structure, unless it was reproduced, since the 1970s or ’80s, of the type of a central or peripheral economic relationship that supposedly justified the Cuban Revolution.

– Ownership structure: A privatized economy such as that of the United States does not fit with an economy as nationalized as that of Cuba. What would be the State partnership of Cuba with a country like the United States where there isn’t the most remote possibility for a role like the State’s in the Cuban economy, except with regards to trade relations?

– Creating wealth: If the Cuban economic model of production was always one of State capitalism, there is a key difference with the American model. There the economic model is one of openness and plurality par excellence, and in Cuba, on the contrary, we are faced with the most closed and centralized economy. This leads to an increasingly important difference, the technological differences which are enormous. In this sense, the only option would have been for the United States to give international organizations political license to flood Cuba with credits. But again, we encounter the obstacle that we are enemies.

– Economic policy: The sectors that could be attractive to the United States, for example tourism and cultural sectors, were only opened up in Cuba in the nineties and then only reluctantly.** In the 1970s and ‘80s allowing Yanke tourism in Cuba, the only potential area of economic ties, would have run up against that era’s most important concept of political control: ideological diversionism. US tourism would have brought the American Way of Life, inconceivable in that time.

– Ideological: The inevitable contamination from the United States can only be assimilated in a Cuba faced with the exhaustion and advanced age of the Revolution, and the cultural failure of “We will be like Che.” What’s left of that model supposedly superior to and incompatible with capitalism?

In reality, the only chance of economic relations with the United States, in conditions of political peace, would have been through the facilitation of credit and then we would have had a problem not only with the Paris Club, but also with the Washington Consensus and the vulture funds. The inefficiency of the Cuban economy cannot be solved with money.

There is no analysis that could reconcile the Cuban Revolution being in a normal economic relationship with the United States. The Cuban Revolution is a “permanent revolution.” Permanent revolution is war, although it was a cold war, with the United States.

But the government’s insistence on compensation for a voluntary war with the United States, far beyond the political necessity of balancing the accounts for the uncompensated nationalizations, reveals the subconscious of those in power in Cuba: If the model of the command economy was possible with a war mentality, it is only sustainable in relation to the American economy. The Revolutionary “Plattism*” of the better.

Translator’s notes:
*The term “Plattism” refers to the Platt Amendment passed by the US Congress and subsequently adopted into Cuba’s first Constitution in 1901 as a condition for the United States removing its troops from the island. The Amendment gave the United States authority to intervene in Cuba’s foreign affairs, an “occupation without occupiers.”
**After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its massive subsidies to Cuba, the State was forced to seek other sources of foreign exchange.