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CUBA - EU:
Castro Slams the Door Once Again
Patricia
Grogg
HAVANA, (IPS) - Cuba has once again
withdrawn its request to join the Cotonou
Agreement, through which the European
Union extends aid and preferential trading
conditions to former colonies in Africa,
the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP).
Cuba's decision reflects the tensions that
currently mark its ties with the EU, which
has loudly criticised the stiff prison
sentences handed down in Havana to 70
dissidents in April and the execution of
three men who hijacked a passenger ferry.
By cancelling its application to enter the
trade and aid pact, the government of
Fidel Castro responded to a decision
adopted on Apr. 30 by the European
Commission, the bloc's executive organ,
which indefinitely suspended consideration
of Cuba's request due to human rights
concerns.
The application was originally to be
presented to the EU Council of Ministers
in June.
''In practice, that decision had left
Cuba's request in limbo, and was aimed at
exercising pressure against our country,
setting unacceptable conditions and
interfering in the country's internal
affairs,'' the Foreign Ministry stated in
a communique issued Monday.
After the Apr. 30 decision, Cuban Foreign
Minister Felipe Pérez Roque had said that
''Our country can be neither blackmailed
nor pressured.''
He also underlined that Cuba had asked to
join the Cotonou Agreement ''on the
request of the Caribbean member nations''
of the ACP, and that it was not thinking
''about the aid, or about European
money.''
Membership in the Cotonou Agreement would
have led to a tripling of EU aid to Cuba.
But ''The conditions for maintaining the
application do not exist,'' the Foreign
Ministry said Monday.
In January, Havana had filed its second
request to join the pact, under which the
EU established a 13.5 billion euro (15.6
billion dollar) fund to finance
development programmes in 77 former ACP
colonies between 2003 and 2008.
Cuba is a full member of the ACP and an
observer to the negotiations that began
last September to reach free trade
agreements that would gradually replace EU
aid to the world's poorest countries.
In April 2000, the Cuban government
withdrew its initial bid to join the
agreement that was signed that year in
Cotonou, a port city in the West African
country of Benin. Through the pact, the EU
extends preferential trade and financing
conditions, as well as aid, to all ACP
countries with the exception of Cuba.
Cuban-European ''relations are at their
lowest point ever, and could get even
worse,'' a Cuban expert on European
affairs, who preferred not to be named,
told IPS.
He predicted that any change in the
situation in the second half of the year
would be ''unlikely, the way things now
stand.'' During that period, Greece will
be replaced as rotating president of the
EU by Italy, which is in favour of an even
more hard-line stance towards Cuba.
At the end of the second quarter of the
year, the EU also intends to renew its
''common position'' on Cuba, in which it
demands that President Fidel Castro's
socialist regime undertake a transition to
democracy prior to any aid agreement.
Cuba is annoyed by the six-monthly
evaluations by the EU, which had announced
in December that it would carry them out
yearly, but after the April arrests of
dissidents and executions said it would
continue with the twice-yearly evaluation
process.
The anonymous expert on European affairs
noted that Foreign Minister Pérez Roque
said in early April that his country had
already cancelled its bid to join once and
that ''if it had to do it again, it
would.''
Thus it did not come as a complete
surprise to observers when the Foreign
Ministry summoned the European Commission
delegation's charge d'affaires in Havana,
Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff, on Friday to
inform him that Cuba was cancelling its
application.
The anonymous source also said Havana
could have taken a less drastic step and
avoided slamming the door for the second
time on the chance of entering the Cotonou
Agreement.
''It would have been preferable to suspend
our request on this side too, rather than
completely withdraw an application that
has the backing of the ACP,'' said the
source.
Monday's statement by the Foreign Ministry
pointed out that the first application,
filed by Havana in 2000, was also
frustrated when several EU countries tried
to set ''additional discriminatory
requisites for Cuba.''
The Cuban government clarified that it
would like ''increasingly broad
relations'' with the European bloc, with
which it shares deep historical and
cultural ties, and which is the source of
nearly one million tourists who visit this
Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million
every year.
But those ties, the Foreign Ministry
underlined, ''must be based on mutual
respect, non-interference in internal
affairs, and the recognition of the right
of each party to freely choose their own
economic and social system, institutions
and laws.''
Cuba does around 1.9 billion dollars in
annual trade with EU countries. The
right-wing government of Prime Minister
José María Aznar in Spain, the EU
country that does the most trade with
Cuba, is among the staunchest critics of
Castro's socialist government.
Another academic, who also asked not to be
identified, told IPS that he believed the
ACP countries may feel ''frustrated'' by
Cuba's decision to once again revoke its
request to join the pact.
But he ruled out any possible shift in
Cuba's standing in the ACP, in which it
has full membership. That fact, and its
''observer status in the negotiations
indicate that the door is still
half-open,'' he said.
He added that the Cotonou Agreement was
the best chance for ''institutionalising''
Havana's relations with the European bloc,
the leading trade partner and the biggest
foreign investor in Cuba.
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