Wednesday, June 10th 2009
Nobody should have been surprised by Cuba's public spurning of the
opening given it to return to the Organisation of American States (OAS).
The OAS, meeting recently in Honduras, voted unanimously (that is,
including America's Barack Obama administration) to scrap the 1962
decision that suspended Cuba as Fidel Castro's revolution took the
island toward communism and an alliance with the Soviet Union.
That vote did not seem likely early in the meeting since the United
States, through its Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had insisted
that the Caribbean's largest island should not be allowed to return to
the OAS until it embraced democratic principles and made progress on
human rights. Inevitably, that put pressure on the American delegation,
not least from the Castro administration's vocal allies in the region.
It would seem, though, that behind-the-scenes negotiations led to a
diplomatic compromise under which Cuba's re-entry would be "the result
of a process of dialogue begun at the request of the Cuban government
and in line with the practices, purposes and principles of the OAS".
Therein, as they say, lay the rub since the OAS's stated mission is to
defend democracy in the western hemisphere, which means there was
more-much more-to the compromise than met the eye.
If the Castro administration has repeatedly said it has no interest in
returning to the OAS because of its stated view that the OAS is an
instrument of US policy in Latin America, it has also shown not the
slightest interest in moving from a dictatorship to a democracy,
whatever the hopes initially raised by the elder Castro's stepping down
from the presidency in favour of his brother. In seeming to open the
door, therefore, the OAS caveat means that it is up to Cuba to embrace
the democratic reforms that would make it possible for it to return.
Cuba, we have repeatedly argued, is a Caribbean problem and while
Caricom, for example, has agitated for the island's complete return to
the regional fold, it also has an obligation to nudge Cuba in a
democratic direction. Either that, or our leaders would remain culpable
of not doing everything in their power to lift the chains with which the
Cuban people have been bound for nigh on 50 years.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_business?id=161488927
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