Cubans vote in municipal elections with eye to leadership change
Havana, (MILLAT ONLINE):Cubans choose municipal councilors Sunday in island-wide local elections that are the first step in a Communist Party-supervised process meant to culminate next year with the election of a successor to President Raul Castro.
Castro, 86, cast his ballot at a voting station in western Havana, where he stopped to talk to neighbors and students who were guarding ballot boxes, images aired on Cuban television showed.
No opposition candidates are competing in the elections for the more than 12,500 council seats.
Instead, voters will choose from among 30,000 candidates selected by acclamation in neighborhood assemblies.
More than eight million people are eligible to cast ballots, but voting is voluntary. Ballots are secret. More than 82 percent turned out, as of two hours before polls closing, the head of the national elections board said.
Cuba’s only direct election, the municipal vote is the first step in a tightly controlled, multi-step process for choosing leaders at higher levels of government.
It is set to culminate in February with the election of Castro’s successor as president, in what would be the first generational change of leadership since the 1959 revolution led by his brother Fidel.
For the first time in nearly six decades, it appears, Cuba’s president will not be named Castro or be a member of the old guard that came to power during the revolution.
Sunday’s balloting comes a day after Cuba marked the first anniversary of Fidel Castro’s death.