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sent hastily from all over by political leaders to candidate George Bush, but subsequently they had to be rectified or withdrawn by those who sent them.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 Elián González.

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 GALVÃO DE FIGUEIREDO Lisboa, Portugal Visite o sítio da AMERLIS: