The unexpected has happened; something that perhaps hundreds of millions of people in the world and in the United States would have never thought possible, really happened last Tuesday in the American presidential elections.

A great scandal is already known to the world. Congratulation messages hurriedly sent by political leaders to candidate George W. Bush, as soon as the television networks clumsily deceived by the authors of the fraud announced his victory on Wednesday, at 3:00 in the morning, had to be rectified or cancelled by the frustrated senders.

Actually, the United States was without a President elect. The center of this political turmoil, which is considerably damaging that country’s prestige, was again the state of Florida, particularly Miami, where the Cuban-American terrorist mobsters live and prevail; the same that in close alliance with American right wing politicians orchestrated the kidnapping of the Cuban child Elián González.

On that occasion they broke the law, they showed their contempt for several institutions and worse still, for months they both psychologically and physically abused an innocent six-year-old boy and illegally retained him in that country for no reason.

At that moment, armed men hatched complots, worked out criminal plans, organized a violent resistance, disturbed order in the city and finally trampled over and burnt the American flag in an angry reaction to the child’s return to Cuba, thanks to the intense struggle waged by our people and the support offered by the overwhelming majority of the public to the right of the child, his father and his legitimate family.

In fact, the American people was profoundly hurt by the images shown on television.

Hardly six months had passed since those shameful events when fate would have it that the state of Florida became a decisive factor in the presidential election. This time the mobsters played all the cards. Thirsty for revenge, wanting to recover the lost ground and with the complicity of their allies in the U.S. Congress, they first maneuvered to tighten the blockade against our country, to thwart initiatives favoring the sale of foods and medicines, to turn into law the prohibition to Americans of traveling to Cuba and to deprive this nation of its funds blocked in the United States. After all this, on election day, when a very close presidential election was to be decided, they felt that they could also determine who should be the next President of the United States of America.

It was obvious, since the wee hours of yesterday, that not only were huge amounts of money invested in that effort but that they also had shamelessly resorted to electoral fraud, just like their fathers had done in Cuba before the Revolution. Those experts in having even the dead cast a vote --which they have done in Miami more than once-- stole the ballot boxes, changed votes, stalked the voters outside the polling stations to put pressure on them, and resorted to the trick of changing the candidates’ position in the ballot to mislead voters, many of whom were retired elders who wanting to vote for a candidate wrongly voted for another and then cried bitterly out of frustration as victims of a cruel deception.

Dark clouds cast a shadow over the U.S. political scenario today. Again, that nation is paying the price for the criminal policies pursued by its leaders against our homeland, for the alliance made with those embezzlers and war criminals who escaped from Cuba, for the blockade and the economic warfare, for the murderous Cuban Adjustment Act, which has caused so many deaths and protected the dregs of society and outlaws wantonly admitted to that country without the need for any documents.

What can they say to the world now? How will they be able to placate the irritation, the mockery and the scandal? How will they correct this wrong? After so many tricks, anomalies and irregularities, no one will find a simple vote recount acceptable. That could not correct the results of the rigged election, nor the pressures and the deception used to influence the final results. The votes in Florida could be recounted a thousand times while the fraud remained untouched.

Putting aside the enormous figure of 3 billion dollars spent on the electoral campaigns and their publicity --which certainly undermines any pretenses of a democratic model, a government by the people and for the people-- under the present circumstances the American leaders are left with only one option: that of calling on new elections in the state of Florida, at least to know who is the real winner and to preserve the fiction that in that country there is something that resembles a democracy and not what is pejoratively called "a banana Republic".

November 9, 2000