By Ginger Thompson. New York Times News Service. Published
Monday, February 4, 2002 in The Miami Herald
HAVANA -- President Vicente Fox of Mexico met here on Sunday with President
Fidel Castro to try to restore a century-old diplomatic relationship that was
built upon a shared history of popular revolutions but was damaged in recent
years as Mexico began its transition to a multiparty democracy.
The meeting between the Mexican president, a conservative businessman who is
widely considered a symbol of democratic reform in Latin America, and Castro,
the region's most resilient communist revolutionary, was compared by experts to
a political high-wire act, with Fox struggling to balance conflicting national
and international interests.
Despite those pressures, the tone of Fox's 24-hour visit, the first official
trip to Cuba by a Mexican head of state in nearly eight years, was distinctly
cordial.
"A century of diplomatic relations is a symbol of the fraternal links
that bind Cuba and Mexico,'' Fox said in a government palace in Havana's
historic center.
"The relations between our governments are deep and solid and have
endured the toughest tests.''
Fox's public agenda focused on Mexico's desire to improve commercial ties
with Cuba, which ruptured in the early 1990s with the enactment of new trade
restrictions against Cuba in the United States. Since then, $400 billion in
trade between Cuba and Mexico has plummeted to a little more than $100 million.
During Fox's first year in office, trade between the two countries has increased
to a little more than $300 million.
But aides to Fox said that in several hours of private talks, he broached
serious political issues, including the fate of several Cuban political
prisoners and his opposition to the U.S. trade sanctions against Cuba enacted
under the Helms-Burton Acts in the 1990s. Although Fox had publicly denied that
he would meet with human rights activists in Cuba, senior Mexican officials
indicated that he would meet with a small group of Cuban opposition leaders
today.
In the days before his arrival, Fox, the opposition leader whose election 18
months ago ended the 71-year rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was
barraged by conflicting pressures over how stridently, and how publicly, to
advocate democratic reforms in Cuba.
Traditional political leaders of the former governing party, which continues
to hold a majority in the combative Mexican Congress, urged Fox to mend fences
with Castro.
But weighing against reconciliation were pressures from leaders of Fox's
pro-business National Action Party, who urged Fox to meet with Cuban dissidents
during his visit here.
Copyright 2002 Miami Herald | 
