Havana: Cuban President Raul Castro accused the United States of helping to set up and legitimise an "electoral farce" in Honduras, in the wake of elections that didn't include ousted president Manuel Zelaya.
The Honduran people "have been deprived of their constitutional rights and there has been imposed, with the support of the US administration and a coup-led government (in
Honduras), an electoral farce," Raul, 77, told a regional summit here.
Cuba, the Americas' only one-party communist regime, has had no political opening of its own in over 50 years.
But Raul Castro defended the right of Zelaya democratically elected in a multiparty vote to have been reinstated.
The Cuban President told the gathering of ALBA, a leftist bloc conceived by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, that the "majority of Latin American and Caribbean governments had condemned unequivocally" the military coup that ousted Zelaya on June 28.
ALBA, which approved economic sanctions against the de facto Honduran government of Roberto Micheletti, called for international pressure to reject the November 29 Honduran elections won by president-elect Porfirio Lobo.
Castro also lamented Zelaya's absence at the ALBA summit, as the deposed leader is still holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.
PTI
First Published: Monday, December 14, 2009, 09:25