Delegates propose to hold countless meetings but warn that the solution depends on the Government
14ymedio, Havana, September 14, 2024 — A new “meeting fever” threatens to occupy the agenda of Cuba’s leaders between September and November. The huge number of exchanges they have planned to attend is almost impossible, but it already appears on paper: in Villa Clara alone, for example, they will carry out 5,300 “dialogues with the people.” In Havana there will be more than 10,000. In heavily populated municipalities, such as Arroyo Naranjo, the plan is to celebrate 1,327.
These are the accountability assemblies – in which each delegate is accountable to the voters – that the Government held in 2021 and then postponed for several reasons: the pandemic, first, and then the endless “situation that the country faced,” a label with which the official press summarizes three years of blackouts, shortages and transport crises.
There has been little change in Cuba, but Parliament considers it so “necessary” to hold meetings that workers who attend will even be exempted from work. The “essences of the Revolution” are at stake, argued the organizing committee in Havana. According to Liván Alonso Izquierdo – former secretary of the Party in Ciego de Ávila, promoted to a post in Havana – the assemblies propose an objective: “to defend the Cuban political system.”
According to Liván Alonso Izquierdo, the assemblies propose an objective: “to defend the Cuban political system”
The local leaders have taken the instruction literally, and even meeting “rehearsals” are being carried out. In the Virginia People’s Council, in Santa Clara, the leaders of Villa Clara held their “model assembly” this week. It is part of the long process of preparing the cadres that the official press has been reporting on for months – also with