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Aide says Blanco feared offending Castro while in Cuba
BATON ROUGE, 14 (AP) -- Gov. Kathleen Blanco never planned to meet with
Cuban President Fidel Castro on her trip to the Caribbean island, but had lunch
with the dictator to avoid offending him, a Blanco spokeswoman said Monday. Officials
with the state Republican Party attacked the Democratic governor over the weekend
for meeting with Castro during her three-day trade mission to the communist country.
Roger Villere, chairman of the state GOP, said Saturday that the meeting was ''an
insult to our foreign policy and the president of the United States.'' Denise
Bottcher, a Blanco spokeswoman, said the governor received the invitation from
a Cuban government official during a tour of a church in Old Havana on Thursday.
She met with Castro at a convention hall, as did other Louisiana officials on
the trip, including two Republican lawmakers: Sen. Ken Hollis of Metairie and
Sen. Robert Barham, of Oak Ridge, she said. ''The governor never requested the
meeting with (Castro) and did not think it was important in order to do business,''
Bottcher said. ''But by the time the request was made for her to meet with him,
she felt she didn't want to slight him in any way, because two contracts had already
been signed for millions of dollars.'' Blanco clinched a deal to sell $15
million in food products from Louisiana to the Cuban government in the next year.
Bottcher said the governor did not discuss politics or U.S. foreign policy
with Castro or anyone else during her trip. A 2000 law created an exception
to long-standing U.S. trade sanctions against Cuba, allowing American farm goods
to be sold to the island for cash. Cuba has contracted to buy more than $1 billion
in American farm goods -- including shipping and hefty bank fees to send payments
through third nations -- since first taking advantage of the law in 2001. More
than half of those goods have been shipped through New Orleans. In his remarks
on Saturday, Villere said a White House aide asked the state Republicans to denounce
Blanco for the meeting. He has not named the aide, and the group did not have
a quorum to pass a resolution. Villere said the party's executive committee would
draft a policy statement and issue it soon. Cuban immigrant groups have
also criticized Blanco, saying her trip to Cuba could be used by the strongman
as a public relations tool as he tries to offset decades of reports of human rights
abuses by his government.
Intellectuals Back Cuba Over Rights Record By
Vanessa Arrington, Associated Press Writer, March 14, 2005. HAVANA,
Cuba (AP) -- About 200 intellectuals, activists and artists from Latin America
and elsewhere issued a letter Monday urging the top United Nations human rights
watchdog to side with Cuba in an expected battle over the communist country's
rights record. A U.S.-backed resolution to condemn the island's record is
usually presented at every spring meeting in Geneva of the U.N. Human Rights Commission,
which this year was to open Monday and run through April 22. No resolution
targeting the island has emerged this year, but Cuba expects such a proposal will
be presented and considered in mid-April. Last year's resolution passed narrowly,
adopted by 22 votes to 21, with 10 abstentions. "We urge the governments
of the commission's member countries to not permit (the resolution) to be used
to legitimize the anti-Cuban aggression of the administration of (President) Bush,"
the letter said. Washington maintains a four-decades-old trade embargo against
the island, and trade and travel restrictions have been steadily tightened in
recent years. Nobel Peace Prize laureates including Adolfo Perez Esquivel
of Argentina and Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala signed the letter, as did South
Africa's Nadine Gordimer and Portugal's Jose Saramago, both recipients of the
Nobel Prize in Literature. Among American signatories were actor Danny Glover,
author Alice Walker and historian and activist Howard Zinn. Other international
figures included filmmaker Walter Salles of Brazil, the music group Manu Chau
and France's former first lady, Danielle Mitterrand. The letter said the
U.S. government has no moral authority to criticize Cuba's human rights record
after its own scandals over treatment of terror suspects at prisons in Iraq and
the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Some who signed the letter had criticized
Cuba when the government sentenced 75 political opponents to long prison terms
in 2003. Journalists have most hazardous year in a decade WASHINGTON,
14 (AP) - Fifty-six journalists around the world were killed in 2004 because of
their jobs, the deadliest 12 months for reporters in a decade, the Committee to
Protect Journalists reported today. Of the 56, the committee said, 36 were
targeted for death, continuing a long-term trend in annual surveys of the safety
of journalists. "The majority of them are murdered," said Ann
Cooper, executive director of the committee, in an interview with AP Radio. "Local
journalists such as eight killed in the Philippines. They were hunted down and
killed." The profession became more hazardous in other ways, too, as
government intrusions on a free press increased in Russia and all the other former
Soviet republics except the three Baltic states and 122 journalists - 42 of them
in China - were imprisoned for their reporting. A reporter was jailed for job-related
reasons in the United States for the first time in three years. Cooper said
that for China, "that's a record. It's been the world's leading jailer of
journalists for several years." In releasing the report, "Attacks
on the Press in 2004," the advocacy group said, "Nowhere are new, harsh
realities more evident than in Russia, where a purge of independent voices on
national television and an alarming suppression of news coverage during the Beslan"
school "hostage crisis marked a year in which President Vladimir Putin increasingly
exerted Soviet-style control over the media." Only in Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia, tiny Baltic states subsumed into the Soviet Union in 1940, have traditions
of strong press freedom been established, the report said. In the other
12 former Soviet republics, it said, controls on the press are more stringent
than at any time since the closing years of Soviet communism. The rise of a pro-Western
government in Ukraine after street demonstrations gives hope for change there,
however, the report said. The 56 dead journalists were the most since 66
died in 1994. Many of those were victims of fighting in Algeria's civil war, in
which a military-backed government prevailed over Muslim extremists. In
early December, the committee reported 54 deaths in 2004, but spokeswoman Wacuka
Mungai said the group confirmed two more deaths by the end of the year. She
also said a Brussels, Belgium-based group, the International Federation of Journalists,
which reported 129 media professionals killed in 2004, uses a different way of
counting, including accidents and people who might have been involved in political
work. Iraq remained by far the most dangerous country for journalists, and
2004 featured a dramatic shift of the risk of death in combat to native Iraqi
journalists. Most of the 23 reporters killed were Iraqis, and the committee
said nine of the 23 were murdered. "The toll made the war in Iraq one
of the deadliest conflicts for journalists in recent history," the report
found. Most of the reporters jailed were locked up on vague "anti-state"
charges, such as sedition, subversion and working against the interests of the
state. Besides China, Cuba with 23, Eritrea with 17 and Myanmar with 11
accounted for more than three-quarters of the 122 imprisoned. The only
American sentenced was Jim Taricani of WJAR-TV in Providence, R.I., serving six
months' home confinement for refusing to reveal a source.
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