Unrelenting United States pressure on Cuba, set to ratchet up again at next week’s United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva, is testing relations between the Bush administration and a new generation of centre-left Latin American leaders.
As it has done each year since the early 1990s, the US will urge the commission to adopt a resolution condemning Cuba’s human rights record. And Cuban officials predict that the US will again use ”arm-twisting and threats” to get its way.
Republican attacks on President Fidel Castro’s communist government intensified during last year’s US election campaign. The Treasury Secretary, John Snow, tightened the 42-year-old embargo and vowed to ”bring an end to ruthless and brutal dictatorship”.
But US President George W Bush’s victory has not eased the pressure. A Republican-led congressional committee gave a platform to Cuban dissidents last week to publicise Cuba’s ”atrocious” behaviour. Porter Goss, the CIA chief, recently described Cuba as a source of regional instability.
The US devotes an estimated $36-million a year to encouraging political change in Cuba, employing the ”soft power” tactics successfully used in Eastern Europe.
But according to Abelardo Moreno, Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister, the latest moves could foreshadow more muscular intervention. ”US officials are speaking of regime change in Cuba. They were already attacking us as sponsors of terrorism. Now we are told we are an ‘outpost of tyranny’,” Moreno said this week. ”We do not discount the possibility of military action against Cuba. The administration has to prepare public opinion. So human rights are being used. If the [UN] resolution is adopted, it will be extremely dangerous, more so than in previous years.”
Christine Chanet, the UN commission’s Cuba envoy, deplored the country’s detention of 61 dissidents, first jailed in 2003, and the continuing arrest, sentencing and intimidation of non-violent political opponents.
Yet for all its failings Cuba’s government is steadily strengthening ties with its Latin American neighbours.
Recently installed leaders in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Venezuela were raised in the left-wing, activist tradition of the 1970s and 1980s.
While following a broadly pragmatic line all oppose Washington’s embargo as much as they opposed the US-driven, neo-liberal free market policies blamed for Latin America’s economic woes. — Â