Cuba Suggests Anti-Castro Groups Had Role in Florida Election Fraud

by Patricia Grogg

In a front-page editorial, Granma recommended new elections in Florida, whose coastline lies just 70 miles from Cuba, and whose biggest city, Miami, is home to the leaders of the anti-Castro Cuban exile community.

The government of Fidel Castro, at loggerheads with Washington since the 1959 triumph of Cuba's socialist revolution, has not built up any hopes for a thaw in relations with the United States.

To mark his indifference to the elections, Castro, 74, visited a beach near Havana on Nov. 7. "I said that on the day of the U.S. elections I would do what most people in the United States do, and go to the beach," Castro commented to Cuban and foreign sunbathers, including three from the United States.

Nor did Castro show up at the state TV studios November 8, where a group of journalists analyzed the situation caused by apparent electoral irregularities in Florida.

The president has been a frequent presence in the studios since late 1999, when young Elian Gonzalez was rescued at sea. Cubans are closely following events in the United States. Granma stated that U.S. authorities have "no alternative but to hold a re-vote in the state of Florida."

Granma accused anti-Castro sectors, which it described as the "Cuban-American terrorist mafia," and their "extreme right-wing" allies of believing themselves capable of "deciding who will be the president of the United States" by shelling out enormous sums of money and staging electoral fraud.

"They stole ballot boxes, switched votes around, surrounded voting stations to pressure voters, and resorted to the trick of changing the order of the candidates on the ballots to induce voters to make mistakes," stated the editorial.

Whoever takes Florida's 25 electoral college votes will be the 10th president in the White House since Castro took power in January 1959.

"It doesn't matter who is elected. We are prepared to confront whoever it is, convinced that nothing and no one can weaken the Cuban revolution," Castro said late last month in Venezuela.

Castro believes that no matter which candidate wins, the next U.S. president will seek to stiffen the nearly four-decade blockade against Cuba. Cuban representatives brought up the case of the embargo again this week at the United Nations General Assembly, seeking yet another condemnation of the blockade.

"We do not care in the least who will be the head of government of the superpower that has imposed its hegemonic and dominant power on the world," said Castro, who added that if the next U.S. president wanted to change his country's policy towards Cuba, he would have to do so unilaterally.

For his part, Catholic priest Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a prominent intellectual in Cuba, said "Bush and Gore coincide in their aim to maintain the embargo and a hard-line policy towards Cuba, which leads us to believe there will not be any major changes."

De Cespedes maintained that the economic and commercial sanctions introduced by Washington against Havana in the early 1960s were unethical, unfair and "politically useless," because rather than contributing to improving the situation in Cuba, they have had the opposite effect.

The Cuban Episcopal Conference has opposed the embargo since 1969, a position supported by bishops in the United States, De Cespedes underlined.

Among academic circles, however, there are those who believe Washington's position towards Havana is shifting, albeit too slowly to have translated into any concrete changes.

Prof. Esteban Morales commented that within the U.S. executive branch and Congress there is growing opposition to the blockade, because that policy is "affecting domestic interests" in the United States.

That points to the emergence of a business lobby that could demand the restoration of economic ties with the island, and which has already made its presence felt in the internal U.S. debate on Cuba, stressed Morales in an article for the local magazine Temas.

According to other researchers, the amendment approved by the U.S. Congress last month permitting sales of food and medicine to Cuba formed part of that trend.

However, Cuban-American lawmakers transformed the original bill, making business negotiations between the U.S. business community and the Cuban state virtually impossible.

Nevertheless, Cuban analysts say they discern the end of four decades of a policy of isolation towards Cuba in the passage of that amendment.