|
Yahoo! April 23, 2002.
Uruguay Breaks Ties With Cuba
By Raul Garces, Associated Press Writer Tue Apr 23, 9:25 PM
ET
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) - Uruguay's president announced Tuesday that his
country was breaking diplomatic ties with Cuba, days after Uruguay sponsored a
U.N. human rights vote targeting Fidel Castro 's government.
The surprise announcement by President Jorge Batlle came as the Uruguayan
leader charged Cuba with a series of insults against this South American nation.
Cuban President Fidel Castro, who was speaking live on a government
television program in Havana when the announcement was made, characterized
Batlle as "a lackey."
Uruguay sponsored a resolution targeting Cuba that was passed Friday by the
U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. The vote was a tight 23-21 with nine
abstentions.
The resolution invited the communist-run country to provide its people with
greater civil and political rights. It also exhorted Cuba to allow a U.N.
representative to visit the island — an idea Havana rejected.
Almost all Latin American nations on the 53-member commission approved the
human rights measure, prompting Cuba to term them all "Judases."
Castro seemed unconcerned as he read the story about Uruguay aloud on air.
He said that that while Uruguay was breaking relations with Cuba, plans were
under way to vaccinate 300,000 Uruguayan children with meningitis vaccines
donated by Cuba to the South American country.
On Monday night, Castro had referred to Batlle as that "hungover,
abject Judas who presides over Uruguay."
Leading up to the U.N. vote in Geneva, Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez
Roque accused Uruguay of "genuflecting" and of "being servile"
to the United States by sponsoring the resolution.
At a news conference late Tuesday, Batlle bluntly complained that insults by
Cuban leaders "continued to escalate in tone" to the point that
Uruguay was forced to act.
"The rupture will remain until it is clear that the Cuban people have
peace and liberty," Batlle bristled at the news conference in this South
American capital.
Batlle said he instructed Foreign Minister Didier Opertti to carry out the
necessary steps to formalize the break. He did not elaborate.
But Guillermo Valles, an undersecretary to Opertti, later told The
Associated Press that Cuba's ambassador would be ordered to leave the country
within 72 hours.
The Cuban ambassador to Uruguay, Jose J. Vazquez Portela, had no immediate
comment. And there was no immediate word if Cuba would take any similar steps
toward Uruguay.
Diplomatic relations between Uruguay and Cuba were restored in 1986, a year
after the end of 12 years of right-wing military-dictatorship in Uruguay that
had interrupted ties.
But relations fell on rocky times in the weeks leading up to the Geneva
vote. Uruguay's government went so far as to recall its ambassador, Enrique
Estrazulas, to show its displeasure.
Cuba Scandal Widens Rifts in Mexico
By Lisa J. Adams, Associated Press Writer. Tue Apr 23, 9:53
PM ET
MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico's latest embarrassing row with Cuba has deepened
divisions between President Vicente Fox and a defiantly independent Congress.
Leftist lawmakers on Tuesday accused the Mexican leader of pressuring Cuban
President Fidel Castro to leave a U.N. development summit last month and then
lying about it.
On Monday, Castro released a tape of a private conversation confirming Fox
had asked him to leave before President Bush arrived in the northern Mexican
city of Monterrey for the summit. Mexican officials had vigorously denied that
they orchestrated Castro's early departure.
"This is the biggest disgrace Mexican foreign policy has suffered; the
president's conduct is shameful," said Marti Batres, a leader of the
leftist Democratic Revolution Party.
Fox has not addressed the matter publicly, but Foreign Secretary Jorge
Castaneda said Tuesday that the Mexican government had "absolutely nothing"
to apologize for — and that Fox never asked Castro to stay away from the
summit.
Castaneda also reiterated the government's assertion on Monday that Mexico
would maintain diplomatic relations with Cuba, but he said that Castro committed
"a grave violation of a basic rule of communication between chiefs of
state:" confidentiality. Fox is heard on the tape obtaining Castro's
assurance that their conversation would remain private.
Historically friendly relations between Cuba and Mexico began to fray in the
past three months. First, Fox and Castaneda met with political dissidents during
a visit to the island in February. Later that month, Castaneda was accused of
inciting several young men to crash a stolen bus into the Mexican Embassy's
gates in Havana. Then came Fox's request that Castro make a hasty exit from the
summit.
And in the final blow that provoked the Cuban leader to reveal his
conversation with Fox, Mexico backed a U.N. human rights resolution on Friday
censuring Cuba for its human rights record.
In a live radio interview Tuesday, Castaneda alleged that Castro released
the taped conversation with Fox to divert attention from his growing diplomatic
isolation.
"Internally, it does enormous damage to the antidemocratic and human
rights-violating regime of Fidel Castro to know that the government of Mexico no
longer supports the absence of democracy and lack of respect for human rights in
Cuba," Castaneda said.
The Cuba-related controversies have done little to help what most consider
an already poor working relationship between the Mexican Congress and Fox.
Congress has rejected all of the president's major initiatives since his
election in July 2000.
With few days left in the current session and only two sessions preceding
2003 elections, it is practically impossible that Fox's most important proposals
— fiscal reform and reforms of the electricity and oil sectors — are
going to be discussed further in the current Congress.
"So in a way, relations couldn't get any worse," said Benito
Nacif, political analyst and congressional expert at the Center for Economic
Development Research in Mexico City. "It no longer matters all that much.
What matters is who emerges with the public's support in terms of the
relationship with Cuba. This is going to be the fight."
It's unclear who will win, but the topic has already generated protests and
violence. Early Tuesday, a gasoline bomb was thrown against the Cuban Embassy in
Mexico City but failed to ignite. No arrests have been made.
Mexico was the only Latin American nation that refused to cut ties with the
island after the 1959 revolution that brought Castro to power, and many here
still identify Mexico's revolutionary history with Cuba's.
Fox, who has cultivated friendly relations with Bush, has gradually shifted
Mexico's attitude closer to the U.S. policy.
The challenge of the newly independent Congress now is to balance criticism
of Fox and his Cuban policy against the risk of being seen as supporting a
foreign leader instead of their own president.
"They don't want to be seen as fracturing national unity," Nacif
said.
Under more than seven decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI, Congress traditionally did little more than rubber stamp the
president's initiatives.
But when Fox became the first opposition candidate to assume the presidency,
the legislature was faced with a new role as a legitimate balance of executive
power.
Earlier this month, lawmakers blocked Fox from leaving the country, and they
have ordered Castaneda to appear before them to explain his actions regarding
Cuba.
Fox has accused the PRI, which has a plurality in Congress, of blocking his
initiatives, while lawmakers accuse the president of failing to effectively
promote and negotiate his proposals.
"The government has no political operatives in Congress," Batres
was recently quoted as saying. "They don't tell us what's going on. They
don't try to gauge the sensitivity of each issue."
State Dept. Denies Cubans Officials
By Christopher Thorne, Associated Press Writer. Tue Apr 23,
7:41 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Democratic senator who favors ending the 40-year-old
U.S. trade embargo with Cuba is inviting Cuban officials to visit his home
state, North Dakota, even though the State Department has revoked their visas.
Sen. Byron Dorgan sent a letter Tuesday to Pedro Alvarez, president of
Alimport, the Cuban agency that buys food from abroad, and asked him to come to
North Dakota to discuss buying wheat and beans.
Dorgan said he has told Secretary of State Colin Powell about the invitation
and asked Powell to see that Alvarez and other Alimport officials get visas.
"If Cuba wants to buy dried beans and wheat, and North Dakota's family
farmers want to sell those products to Cuba, the State Department needs to step
aside and allow those sales to take place," Dorgan said.
Alvarez and other Alimport officials had planned to travel to the United
States to buy food, but the State Department revoked their previously approved
visas this month. Dorgan said the State Department told members of his staff
that the visas were canceled because the Bush administration's policy was not to
encourage grain trade with Cuba.
Edward Dickens, a spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs of the State
Department, said it is long-standing U.S. policy to discourage travel in the
United States by members of the Cuban government.
Cash grain sales are allowed with the communist-run island under a law
enacted two years ago. The law forbids private or public financing of such
sales.
Alimport has bought about $75 million in U.S. farm products in the past six
months. Alvarez's trip could have produced about $25 million in new sales,
according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.
The North Dakota Farm Bureau also is pushing for the administration to grant
visas. If that doesn't happen, bureau officials may seek to travel to Cuba to
negotiate food sales.
"Exporting U.S. agricultural products to Cuba is not an easy task, but
if we succeed, it will bring millions of dollars into the state," Farm
Bureau President Eric Aasmundstad said.
Also on Tuesday, the House voted 273-143 to urge its own negotiators at a
House-Senate conference on a major farm bill to accept the Senate version that
repeals existing restrictions against private financing of agricultural sales to
Cuba. The vote is not binding on the negotiators and the Senate provision is
opposed by the administration.
On the Net:
State Department's Cuba page:
http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/c2461.htm
Fidel Castro says Mexican president encouraged him to not to attend
U.N. conference
By Anita Snow, Associated Press Writer. Tue Apr 23, 3:04 PM
ET
HAVANA - Calling Mexico's human rights vote against Cuba "the last
straw," an angry President Fidel Castro on Monday played a tape recording
of Mexican President Vicente Fox encouraging him not to attend a U.N. conference
last month — contradicting Mexican officials' earlier account of Castro's
sudden departure from the gathering.
The Cuban leader's dramatic playing of the tape could have profound
consequences on already ticklish relations with Mexico and could create
political problems for Fox among Mexican lawmakers and other politicians who are
troubled by their country's recent tiffs with the communist country.
Mexican officials earlier had vigorously denied charges by Cuba that they
had orchestrated Castro's early departure from the U.N. poverty conference held
in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey in early March.
"The aftermath of telling these truths could be that diplomatic
relations are severed," Castro said after playing for journalists and Cuban
officials a taped telephone conversation between the two presidents that took
place about 24 hours before the Cuban leader planned to leave for the
conference.
In the conversation, Fox sounds tentative about Castro's last-minute
decision to travel to the conference already underway, saying "this
surprise, at the last minute, creates many problems for me."
Ultimately, the tape has Fox agreeing that Castro has the "absolute
right" to attend the conference.
But the Mexican president asks Castro to leave immediately after lunch the
day he was scheduled to give his lunchtime speech.
Castro made his speech before noon, then left the conference shortly
afterward.
President George W. Bush arrived at the conference shortly after Castro's
sudden departure.
In Mexico City Monday night, Fox spokesman Rodolfo Elizondo did not dispute
the content of the tape but said that Mexico never unfairly pressured Castro.
"President Fox at no time asked his counterpart to not go to the
Monterrey summit," Elizondo told a news conference. "As the recording
shows, the president of Cuba accepted the agreed forms of participation which,
at any time, he was within his rights to reject." He said the two
presidents ended the conversation "as friends."
Elizondo said Mexico "considers it unacceptable that Cuban authorities
have violated the privacy of the conversation between two heads of state,
breaking an agreement of trust and good faith." He also insisted that
Castro's tape would not cause greater division among Mexico's political parties.
During his two-hour presentation to reporters Monday night, Castro
acknowledged that he and Fox had agreed the conversation would be private, but
said that Mexico's decision to join the U.N. Human Rights Commission vote
censuring Cuba on Friday "was the last straw."
"If anyone could prove that such a conversation never took place, and
that those were not President Fox's words, I would firmly offer my immediate
resignation to all my positions and responsibilities at the head of the Cuban
state and revolution," Castro said in a statement broadcast live on state
radio and television.
Elizondo denied that the United States pressured Mexico to discourage
Castro's participation in the summit or to supporting the U.N. resolution, as
the Cuban leader charged.
"The only government that exercised pressure over Mexico to decide
their vote in Geneva about human rights in Cuba was that of Havana,"
Elizondo said.
Earlier, Interior Secretary Santiago Creel defended Mexico's decision to
vote to censure Cuba for its human rights record.
"A government can only truly be called a democracy if its leaders
respect human rights," Creel said.
The U.N. commission voted 23-21, with nine abstentions, to invite Cuba to
extend greater civil and political rights to its citizens. It exhorted Cuba to
allow a U.N. representative to visit the island — an idea Cuban officials
have rejected.
Almost all Latin American nations on the 53-member commission approved the
resolution. Mexico historically has abstained during the annual vote, in which
the commission has censured Cuba every year over the past decade except 1998. | 
