Reacting to President Fidel Castro's call for plebiscites across the region over a proposed Americas' free trade agreement, a leading dissident called today for a similar popular vote at home on Cuba's communist system.
Castro led hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on Tuesday in a May Day march on the US diplomatic mission in Havana chanting Annexation, No! Plebiscite, Yes! to launch a Cuban campaign for referendums over the trade pact.
"It's true, every Latin American people has the right to be consulted about such an important step as the integration of its country into the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas," Oswaldo Paya, who heads the moderate Christian Liberation Movement, said in a statement.
"We are also urging his (Castro's) government for a plebiscite, not on Cuba's entry into the pact, but on political and economic changes which are vitally necessary for the Cuban people," the dissident added.
Cuba, which maintains a one-party system that it says is more truly democratic than the Western capitalist model, generally does not respond to local dissidents whom it regards as US-backed counter-revolutionaries and traitors.
Mr Paya, and other members of Cuba's small internal dissident movement, are seeking reforms to allow legal opposition groupings and an opening of the state-run socialist economy.
"We do not want solutions from a power to whom there is no course of appeal. The solution is to ask Cubans if they want these changes via a plebiscite," he said.