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Analysis: Cuba's isolation
deepens
By Robert Plummer, BBC
News Online Americas analyst . Monday,
3 May, 2004.
The decision by Mexico and Peru to recall
their ambassadors from Havana shows that
even in Latin America, Fidel Castro is now
increasingly friendless.
Still going strong at 77, the Cuban president
shows no signs of softening his grip on
power. Indeed, he seems determined to preserve
his diehard brand of socialism at any cost,
even if that means alienating his fellow
Latin leaders.
There was a time when concern for Cuba's
human rights record among its neighbours
was tempered by a sneaking admiration for
its defiance of the United States.
The US embargo against Havana was seen
as a punitive action against a small island
nation that dared to go its own way in Washington's
backyard.
But hardline Cuban communism holds few
attractions as a model these days in a continent
where pragmatic President Lula of Brazil
is still the most admired left-wing leader.
Lula has maintained cordial relations with
the Cuban leader while keeping his policies
at arm's length.
By contrast, the regional leader who has
come closest to adopting Mr Castro's ideology,
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, faces a possible
referendum on his presidency as he struggles
to cope with a sharply polarised society
and a battered economy.
And while the Cuban president still dons
his green military fatigues to deliver his
May Day tirades against Washington, his
sober-suited Mexican counterpart Vicente
Fox deals with the US as an economic partner
in the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Petition rejected
Small wonder, then, that the simmering
tensions between Mexico and Cuba over their
differing attitudes to the US have boiled
over once again.
The last time, in April 2002, Mr Castro
picked a public fight with Mr Fox, alleging
he had been forced to leave a United Nations
summit in Mexico early so that he would
not run into President George W Bush.
When the Mexican president denied the
allegation, Mr Castro delivered one of his
trademark two-hour diatribes, complete with
taped extracts from a private telephone
conversation with Mr Fox that he said proved
his point.
Now he has returned to the fray, accusing
Mexico and Peru of doing Washington's bidding
when they voted at the UN last month to
condemn Cuba's human rights record.
It is equally plausible that they did so
out of frustration at the increasingly harsh
treatment of dissidents in Cuba.
Two years ago, opposition activists presented
a petition to Cuba's national assembly calling
for greater civil liberties.
Mr Castro's immediate response to the petition,
known as the Varela Project, was to have
a constitutional amendment passed declaring
that the socialist system in Cuba was untouchable.
Crackdown on dissent
Since then, Cuba has moved to muzzle dissidents,
imprisoning 75 of them last year and a further
10 this year after one-day secret trials.
In other ways, too, Mr Castro has gone
into reverse gear, blocking the country's
tentative progress towards a more market-oriented
economy and restricting internet use for
Cubans.
As a result, countries that thought they
could promote gradual change in Cuba by
engaging in dialogue with it are no longer
seeking to hide their disappointment.
That includes the European Union, denounced
by Mr Castro as Washington's "Trojan
horse" after it dared to criticise
the Cuban authorities' crackdown on dissent.
It seems clear that there will be no radical
change in Cuba as long as Mr Castro remains
in power - but the more intense the country's
isolation now, the more traumatic the effect
is likely to be when his death eventually
comes.
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