Editorial, Granma
A banana republic
SOMETHING unprecedented, which perhaps hundreds of millions of people in
the world and even in the United States never imagined possible, occurred
during the U.S. presidential elections this Tuesday.
Word of a huge scandal is sweeping the globe. When television channels,
deceived by the authors of the fraud, announced his victory at 3 a.m. on
Wednesday, messages of congratulations were sent hastily from all over by
political leaders to candidate George Bush, but subsequently they had to be
rectified or withdrawn by those who sent them.
The United States was left without a president-elect. The epicenter of this
political earthquake, at this moment so damaging to that country�s
prestige, was once again the state of Florida and especially Miami, where
the Cuban-American terrorist mafia is based and rules. That selfsame mafia,
allied with the U.S. extreme right, engineered the kidnapping of Cuban
child Eli�n Gonz�lez.
On that occasion they broke laws, showed no respect for institutions,
and�what�s worse�psychologically tortured and even physically mistreated,
over the course of several months, an innocent boy who was barely six years
old when he was retained for no reason or by any law of that country. Armed
men conspired, criminally plotted, organized plans for violent resistance,
disturbed the peace of the city, and finally trampled and burned the U.S.
flag, in furious protest against the rescue of the child. Thanks to our
people�s intense struggle and the support, on the part of the immense
majority of that country�s population, for the rights of the boy, his
father and his legitimate family, he was returned to Cuba.
On that occasion, there were scenes that deeply distressed the U.S. public.
Barely six months had passed since those shameful events when, as fate
would have it, the state of Florida became a decisive factor in the
presidential election. This time the mafia risked everything. Thirsty for
revenge, anxious to recover lost territory, with the complicity of its
allies in the U.S. Congress, prior to the elections it had finagled a
strengthening of the blockade against our country, frustrating initiatives
in favor of the sales of food and medicines, converting into law the ban on
U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba and managing to wrest away the funds
belonging to Cuba that have been frozen in the United States. When the day
of the very close presidential election arrived, it considered itself
empowered to decide who would be the next president of the United States.
It became clear early yesterday morning that this group had not only
invested copious sums of money, but had also shamelessly resorted to
electoral fraud, as had their predecessors before the Revolution. These
experts in assuring that even the votes of dead people are counted�as they
had already done more than once in Miami�stole ballot boxes, mixed up
votes, surrounded polling places with the aim of pressuring voters,
resorted to changing the order of the candidates on the ballot in order to
trick the voters, many of them retired and elderly citizens who, determined
to vote for a particular candidate, accidentally voted for his rival, and
later cried bitterly out of frustration and because they had fallen victim
to such deception.
Today a dark cloud hangs over the U.S. political panorama. Once again that
nation is paying the price of its leaders� criminal and genocidal policy
against our country, of those leaders� alliance with embezzlers and war
criminals who escaped from Cuba, of the blockade and economic warfare, of
the murderous Cuban Adjustment Act, which has caused numerous deaths and
protects lumpen and criminals who enter that country at will, without any
documentation.
What will they say to the world? How will they quash the indignation, the
jeers and the scandal? How will they right this wrong? Amid so many tricks,
anomalies and irregularities, in the attempt to determine the real winner,
no one will be satisfied any longer by mere vote recounts and similar
formulas which in no way nullify the results achieved and the votes
obtained through fraud, pressure and deceit. The votes in Florida can be
recounted a thousand times, but the fraud will remain intact.
Putting aside the colossal figure of $3 billion USD in electoral expenses
and propaganda, which in and of itself discredits any claims of a
democratic model and a government of the people and by the people, under
the current circumstances the leaders of the United States have no
alternative but to hold a new election in the state of Florida, to find out
who is the winner and to maintain the fiction that in that country there is
something resembling a democracy, and not what they themselves so
disparagingly call a "banana republic."
November 9, 2000
JORGE FIDELINO GALV�O DE FIGUEIREDO
Lisboa, Portugal
Visite o s�tio da AMERLIS: http://www.terravista.pt/AguaAlto/2295/
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