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Roundup: Cuba's local elections feature more younger candidates from growing private sector

Xinhua, April 18, 2015 Adjust font size:

Cuba's upcoming municipal elections are featuring more younger candidates from the country's budding private sector than before, with over 19 percent of the candidates competing under the age of 30.

Cubans will go to the polls Sunday to elect some 12,500 representatives to 168 municipal assemblies, the National Electoral Commission (CEN) announced Friday.

The majority of the country's political leadership, including Cuban leader Raul Castro, now 83, are key figures in the 1959 revolution that overthrew a dictatorship and installed the socialist government.

As another sign of Cuba's changing political and economic landscape, 2.8 percent of the 27,379 candidates who are running for members of local assemblies are self-employed, or part of the country's fledgling private sector.

The public sector has long been the country's main employer, but Castro is trying to change that by introducing limited free-market reforms in certain non-essential sectors.

Also on Friday, a Cuban daily said Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro has called on the country's youth to take pride in their history, and learn from it.

According to youth daily Juventud Rebelde, the retired leader said in a telephone conversation Thursday with the head of a delegation of students touring historic sites of interest that young Cubans should learn from "our glorious past."

Students should visit the site of the former U.S.-owned United Fruit Company, which controlled 140,000 hectares of sugar cane plantations and employed locals to work the land for three-month periods, to bypass labor rights. Following the revolution, such enterprises were nationalized.

Fidel Castro, 88, retired in 2006 for health reasons and was officially succeeded in 2008 by his younger brother, Raul.

The upcoming elections will be the first to take place since Cuba and the United States began normalizing their relations.

The assemblies, composed of representatives proposed and elected by their local communities, are what make Cuba's electoral process truly democratic, the government said.

More than 8 million Cubans are eligible to vote and the turnout is expected to be high. During the past elections in 2012, more than 94 percent of the electorate voted. Endi