Juan O. Tamayo . jtamayo@herald.com. Published Tuesday, April 18, 2000, in the Miami Herald
A campaign to condemn Cuba's human rights record before a respected U.N. agency, set for a vote today, has run into unexpected resistance from three Western nations and opposition over the Elian Gonzalez case, sponsors say.
``I wouldn't say we have a problem. It's tough, but our chances are reasonable,'' said Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Palous of the Czech Republic, cosponsor with Poland of the resolution admonishing Cuba before the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
The commission has condemned President Fidel Castro's regime at eight of its past nine annual meetings in Geneva, in votes that carry no sanctions but put Havana on the U.N. list of major human rights abusers such as Iraq.
But the ballots are always extremely close -- last year's vote was 21-20 against Cuba, with 12 abstentions -- reflecting the bruising lobbying for each and every nation's vote.
U.N. officials in Geneva said procedural delays and the usually long speeches made by delegates could push the vote back to Wednesday.
For the last two years, the Czech Republic and Poland have replaced Washington as lead sponsors of the resolutions on Cuba, using their status as former victims of communism to attack Castro's authoritarian regime and remove the vote from the jaded arena of U.S.-Cuba confrontation.
But Palous and other foreign diplomats in Geneva said this year's vote on Cuba may fall short because of a reluctance to condemn Havana by three key nations normally aligned with Western views on human rights abuses.
Diplomats in Geneva said Chile and Argentina, which voted to condemn Cuba last year, have signaled that they may abstain from this year's ballot under domestic political pressure.
The Socialist Party of Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, elected in January, has a history of close relations with Cuba dating to the Salvador Allende government in the early 1970s.
Argentine President Fernando de la Rua, sworn into office in December, does not want to be seen as following the footsteps of his predecessor, Carlos Menem, a vocal Castro critic, the diplomats in Geneva said.
Late Monday, a senior Argentine official said his government received a call from the Clinton administration earlier in the day expressing concern over its U.N. vote. The official said Argentina had not reached a decision on how it would vote, but suggested it was leaning toward casting its
ballot to condemn Cuba.
Spain, a new member of the U.N. panel, was also threatening to abstain because of U.S. efforts to sanction the Spanish-owned Sol-Melia firm under the Helms-Burton law for building hotels on Cuban lands seized from U.S. owners by the Castro regime, diplomats in Geneva said.
Palous said he hopes other nations that backed Cuba in 1999 will switch this year, but added that the Elian Gonzalez case has made it ``slightly more difficult'' to win support.
Many countries on the human rights commission, whose 53 members are carefully chosen to reflect the United Nations' overall makeup, view the tug-of-war over the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor as a throwback to the U.S.-Cuba confrontations of the Cold War, he said.
The Czech-Polish resolution expresses concern over Cuba's repression of all political opposition and arrests of dissidents and human rights activists, and calls on Castro to free all political prisoners.
Herald staff writer Andres Oppenheimer contributed to this report.
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