HAVANA, (AFP) – Nearly 70 per cent of Cuban voters have signed on to President Fidel Castro’s “populist referendum” to cement socialism into the communist island’s constitution, Cuban officials said yesterday.

According to Pedro Ross, secretary-general of the Cuban Workers Federation, the signatures of 69.9 per cent of Cuban voters were collected on Saturday, the day the “polls” opened.

“The figure surpasses all of our expectations and demonstrates the people’s strong support for the Revolution,” Ross declared.

One hundred and thirty thousand “polling stations” opened early Saturday and were expected to remain open until tomorrow for voters on the island of approximately 11.2 million people to sign on to the measure.

Once voters give their voice, the text is to be approved by the National Assembly, due to meet on July 5.

Castro, who has ruled the island nation since its revolution 43 years ago, himself put pen to paper and signed the measure in a televised ceremony on Saturday.

He has predicted that seven million people will turn out to sign the statement.

But members of the country’s illegal but tolerated dissident groups have charged that the “referendum” – which allows only a yes vote or an abstention – is a transparent ploy to foil Cuban aspirations to democracy.

“They are trying to head off the Varela Project,” said Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz of the opposition Cuban Human Rights Commission on Saturday, referring to a petition bearing more than 11,000 signatures that seeks a referendum on political pluralism and market-minded economic change.

“Imperialist domination and the capitalist system will never come back to Cuba,” Castro told a crowd of about 50,000 people at Cacahual, outside Havana, also on Saturday, the latest gathering in a week of mega-demonstrations around the island to protest US foreign policy and US accusations that Cuba was developing biological weapons.

From Washington, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker on Friday told reporters that rather than addressing the Varela Project, “Castro has chosen to manufacture an alternative petition supporting the current constitution and to intimidate the population into signing it”.