HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba welcomed the lifting of a Cold War-era ban on its membership in the Organization of American States as “a major victory” yesterday, but made clear Havana does not want to rejoin the group.
Washington, which pushed for the ban back in 1962 as revolutionary leader Fidel Castro took Cuba toward Communism, said Havana could still be excluded.
“I think it’s a major victory for Latin America and the Caribbean and for the Cuban people as well,” said Ricardo Alarcon, head of the Communist-ruled island’s parliament.
Asked if Cuba would seek re-entry to the OAS, Alarcon said Wednesday’s consensus vote at an OAS general assembly meeting in Honduras, changed nothing.
Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro has said repeatedly that Cuba had no desire to rejoin the OAS, which he has described as an instrument of neoliberal economic policies and US intervention in Latin America.
“I don’t know how many times we’ve said the same thing. What happened yesterday does nothing to change what we thought yesterday, the day before yesterday and even today,” Alarcon told reporters.
The 34-member OAS unanimously agreed to scrap a decision made at the height of the Cold War, barring Cuba from the hemispheric group as Castro took his Caribbean nation toward Communism and a long embrace with the Soviet Union.
Cuba’s state media, and leftists across Latin America, said the move came “without conditions.” But Washington, which backed the final OAS resolution, said it succeeded in ensuring that Cuba could not rejoin the group automatically, without some foreign scrutiny of its system of one-party rule and respect for human rights.
“Cuba can come back into the OAS in the future if the OAS decides that its participation meets the purposes and principles of the organization, including democracy and human rights,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “A future decision … will turn on Cuba’s commitment to the organization’s values,” Clinton said in a statement.
The United States and Cuba have offered glimmers of hope that they might be ready to end years of hostility.
In mid-April, President Barack Obama pledged a “new beginning” with Cuba after slightly easing the 47-year-old US trade embargo against Havana.
But the OAS resolution seemed to highlight just how difficult it may be when it comes to setting aside decades of mutual antagonism and distrust. Reading from the same OAS text, the two sides had starkly different views of what was actually approved in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
Clinton said the resolution would allow OAS member states to move “beyond rhetoric to results” on Cuba, with a view toward securing “fundamental rights and freedoms.”
Hours after her statement, Alarcon said OAS members had included countries ruled by such unsavory dictators as Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza and Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti.
All were once counted among close US allies, and Alarcon, paraphrasing a famous quote from Groucho — not Karl — Marx, made it clear that Cuba did not care to belong to any club that would have that gruesome threesome as members.
In the United States, the Obama administration and the OAS were criticized by some Cuban-American politicians for what they described as a concession to Cuba’s dictatorship.
“This action constitutes a grotesque and unmerited betrayal of the oppressed people of Cuba,” said US Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart, brothers who are both Republicans representing Miami.
“The OAS is a putrid embarrassment,” they added.
Fidel Castro ran Cuba for nearly 50 years until he retired due to health problems in 2008.
His younger brother Raul Castro, 78, now serves as president.
