Cuba Will Not Return to the OAS
Says Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez
HAVANA TIMES — Cuba will not return to the Organization of American States (OAS) despite the forthcoming visit of its secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, to the island, announced Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez on Friday.
“Cuba’s position in relation to the OAS remains unchanged, we will not return to it,” he said at a press conference during the official opening of the facility where the Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) will take place next week.
The Cuban Foreign Minister said “the OAS has a negative historical baggage as an instrument of domination of the United States that can’t be changed by any reform,” reported dpa news.
The Cuban government justified the invitation to Insulza to the CELAC Summit as a diplomatic courtesy from the “Troika” of the Latin American organization, as took place at the last summit in Santiago de Chile.
The visit of the Secretary General is the first official contact between Havana and the OAS in fifty years. The Caribbean nation was suspended from the Pan American organization in 1962. Although the ban was lifted in 2009, the Cuban government has declined to participate.
Insulza visited Havana in 1996 when he was Chilean foreign minister and his trip was aimed at normalizing relations between Cuba and Chile, broken in 1973 after the military coup of Augusto Pinochet.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez stressed that the CELAC “expresses the common aspirations of the region and is a partner recognized by other international organizations,” without the presence of the US and Canada.
During the second summit of CELAC, the Cuban delegation will propose as one of the key items of discussions between presidents, the issue of economic inequality and “the need to ensure education and health care for all,” said Rodriguez.
Although not part of the official agenda, the Cuban foreign minister announced that several Latin American presidents will participate in the opening of the container terminal at the port of Mariel, which is being built west of the capital with financing from Brazil.
The port work is part of the economic reforms introduced by President Raul Castro, with the aim of becoming a center of attraction for foreign investment.
Political integrity in the same sentence with the implied Castro government? The dictatorship you support not only ‘pimps out’ their most educated professionals abroad and turns a blind eye to the internal human trafficking, but also sells weapons to fellow rogue regimes like North Korea. What integrity is there in the destruction of an entire country for the sake of maintaining political control? Pithy comments like yours are easy to spit out but to substantiate is a wholly different issue.
The OAS is an anachronism : a throwback to the Cold War years when the U.S regularly accused Cuba of fomenting revolution throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and which turned out to be lies.
The reason for the ongoing U.S. hostility to Cuba remains the same: Cuba remains the threat to U.S. capitalist hegemony: that of a good example for other nations in the hemisphere to follow in how it distributes essential goods and services to all .
That threat to capitalists interests remains the reason for the continuing U.S economic war on the people of Cuba.
Cuba always acting with political integrity contrastS with the US
The OAS has proven to be only a tool for US policy in the region. Now the question is whether CELAC will provide a more balanced alternative. I don’t think it could do a worse job at representing the interests of the people of the Americas from Mexico south. Cuba has no reason to want to be in the outdated OAS.