By Andrew Cawthorne
HAVANA, June 29 (Reuters) - Cuba's communist authorities defended on Monday their one-party political system, in place for nearly four decades, against the "liberal, bourgeois" democracy they said others were prescribing for the island.
In an apparent response to renewed international calls for democratic reforms in Cuba, an editorial in state-run weekly Trabajadores (Workers), stated: "We Cubans do not want the sort of democracy that they are proposing for us."
Critics of President Fidel Castro, both within and outside the island, have long urged changes to the political system, under which there have been no multi-party elections since the 1959 Cuban Revolution and opposition is effectively outlawed.
Those calls have increased -- including from Latin American and European nations traditionally more sympathetic to Castro than sworn foes like the United States -- since Pope John Paul's visit in January raised expectations of change.
But Trabajadores, the newspaper of Cuba's state-run trade union movement, insisted: "There is no space for the old liberal-bourgeois view of democracy in a society that rejects the exploitation of man by man, and has not, nor will, give up its socialist principles."
The editorial noted that many outside Cuba acknowledged its social achievements while also "supporting the idea that Cuba should carry out changes to its system of government, with the aim of reconstructing, they say, a democratic society similar to those in our hemisphere".
"With all due courtesy and respect, we Cubans can say that we disagree with that criteria, because the truth is that if we enjoy important social conquests, absent in other countries, it is because we have this system of government and not another one, this democracy and not another one."
Castro and his officials insist their system is more truly "democratic" than Western models.
They point to massive turnouts for elections, the "People's Power" network of governing assemblies at local and national levels, and the existence of "mass organizations" to ensure participation of different social sectors such as workers, students, farmers and women.
But critics say the single-party elections are a mere rubber-stamping of Communist Party supporters, with a high turnout mainly because the government presents it as a moral and patriotic duty to vote.
The people's assemblies have little real power in a nation whose constitution designates the Communist Party as the "organized vanguard of the Cuban nation ... the superior leading force of society and the State." And the mass organizations are invariably pro-government movements, the critics add.
Trabajadores charged that high absenteeism and large sums of money spent on campaigns contaminated other democracies in the region. "We do not think that democracy ends, or starts, with electoral processes," it added.
The newspaper cited as cautionary examples absenteeism of 63 percent in Guatemala, 52 percent in the United States, and 48.8 percent in Colombia, and also noted the high-spending in an upcoming California election where it said one candidate had invested $35 million.
"You have to be blind not to see the existence of an electoral industry," the editorial said.
Analysts and diplomats in Havana said the comments seemed aimed at dampening expectations of political reforms following the pontiff's historic trip in January and a slew of high-level foreign visits since then.
Many of the visitors, including Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Brazilian Foreign Minister Luiz Felipe Lampreia, have called openly in Cuba for changes to the system and freedom for jailed dissidents.
20:12 06-29-98
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.