Cuba Says It Won't Cooperate with UN on Human Rights

Reuters, Friday, April 18, 2003; 7:12 PM
By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - Communist-run Cuba said on Friday it would not allow a visit by a U.N. envoy to probe alleged human rights abuses on the island following the worst crackdown in decades on opponents of President Fidel Castro.

Facing growing international isolation, Cuba said it was considering the withdrawal of a request to join a European Union preferential trade and aid accord with former colonies due to European criticism of its rights record.

Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Cuba reserved the right to shut down the U.S. diplomatic mission that Havana has charged with spearheading efforts to undermine the Caribbean island's one-party Communist state.

In the past month, Cuba has rounded up 75 dissidents and imprisoned them for terms of up to 28 years in a move to stamp out budding pro-democratic opposition to Castro, despite widespread international criticism of the arrests.

Last week, Cuba shocked human rights organizations with the execution by firing squad of three men who hijacked a Havana Bay ferry in a failed bid to cross the Florida Straits to the United States.

The U.N. Human Rights Commission passed a resolution in Geneva on Thursday urging Cuba to accept a commission decision taken last year that French magistrate Christine Chanet travel to Cuba to report on the rights situation.

Cuba has so far refused to allow her into the country.

"Cuba will not collaborate with the mandate of this spurious and illegal resolution. Cuba will not collaborate with the high commission's representative and will not allow her to come to Cuba," Perez Roque said at a news conference.

Cuba says the resolution presented by four Latin American countries -- Peru, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Uruguay -- was a maneuver by its longtime ideological foe, the United States, to undermine its communist society born of a 1959 revolution.

The 53-state U.N. commission spurned a tougher resolution from Costa Rica, backed by Washington and the EU, that demanded the release of the recently imprisoned dissidents.

EUROPEAN AID IN DOUBT

EU foreign ministers on Monday condemned the crackdown and warned it would hurt European cooperation with Cuba, which in January applied to join the 78-nation Cotonou Agreement that could treble European aid to Cuba's battered economy.

The EU is Cuba's largest trading and investment partner, and the main source of its international aid.

"We are seriously considering" withdrawing the request, Perez Roque said, because some European nations had conditioned Cuban membership on human rights considerations.

"Cuba will not be pressured," he told reporters.

The minister said the executions were regrettable but necessary to stop further hijackings and the development of a mass exodus of illegal migrants to Florida.

Perez Roque said the annual U.N. rights resolutions against Cuba were engineered by the United States to keep justifying the economic sanctions and travel restrictions Washington imposed four decades ago to try to oust Castro.

Peru on Friday recalled its ambassador in Havana for consultations after Cuban officials called the four Latin American sponsors of the U.N. resolution "disgusting lackeys" of the United States.

Welcoming passage of the resolution on Thursday, the White House said it was working with other nations "to find new ways to effect a peaceful democratic transition in Cuba."

Perez Roque gave the U.N. proceedings a different spin, saying Cuba had scored a "moral victory" by defeating the tougher resolution calling for the release of the dissidents.

The New York Times reported the Bush administration was considering suspending family remittances by Cuban-Americans among a series of steps to punish Cuba for the crackdown. The cash remittances, estimated to total as much as $1 billion a year, are a vital source of income for many Cubans coping with hardship in Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

© 2003 Reuters

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