HAVANA — Acting President Raul Castro — not his older brother Fidel — was the top vote-getter in Cuban parliamentary elections, according to official results Wednesday.
Bespectacled, camera shy and far less charismatic than Cuba’s ailing longtime leader, the 76-year-old Raul received 99.4 percent of votes cast in the family’s base of Santiago in eastern Cuba — a percentage point more than Fidel got.
Both brothers easily won re-election to the rubber-stamp legislature, as did all of the 614 candidates presented to the island’s 8.4 million voters on Jan. 20.
The younger Castro has been governing Cuba since his brother underwent intestinal surgery in July 2006 and provisionally ceded power.
In an essay published Wednesday, the elder Castro said that U.S. President George Bush reached a low point in “demagoguery, lies and total lack of ethics” in Monday’s State of the Union address.
“For a population that knows how to read, write and think, nobody can offer a more elegant criticism of the empire than Bush himself,” Castro wrote, using a term Cuban officials often use for the United States.
