MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

OAS Secretary General wants Cuba back again in the organization

Insulza: OAS Assembly is the only Forum to debate abolishing 1962 on Cuba

The Secretary General of the Organization of American States, OAS Jose Miguel Insulza said Friday that he will ask its members to readmit Cuba almost half a century after the country was ousted for its “communist alignment”.

Mr. Insulza made the remarks on the sidelines of the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad Tobago which has convened leaders from 34 nations of the hemisphere, including US president Barack Obama, but excluding Cuba.

US-Cuba relations have been largely frozen since the Cold War but a thaw could be in the horizon following statements from Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Cuban president Raul Castro conciliatory attitude. .

“We're going step by step” said OAS head Jose Miguel Insulza, explaining that he will ask the group's general assembly in May to annul the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba.

Other leaders arriving in Trinidad also offered to help. Jamaica's Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, said the 15-member Caribbean Community is willing to mediate any Cuba-US talks on easing tensions and lifting the decades-old US trade embargo against Cuba.

“I'm hoping that nothing is done that will make the process more difficult and that we seek to encourage further progress rather than cause the situation once again to become polarized and intractable,” he said.

There is a growing clamour in the region to end efforts to isolate Cuba, not just from Raul and Fidel Castro's close friends, but also from conservative US allies like Mexico and Colombia.

Raul Castro spoke Thursday at a meeting of leaders in Venezuela who vowed to represent Cuba's interests in Trinidad. Vehemently defending his government's resistance to the US, he said “the OAS should disappear” and that Cuba would never want to join the organization he called a tool of the US

“The North Sea will unite with the South Seas, a serpent will be born from an eagle's egg before Cuba joins the OAS,” Castro said.

Inzulza said Castro's feelings are only natural: “If my country were suspended from an organization for nearly 50 years I'd be very upset.”

The Communist Party newspaper Granma on Friday did not carry Castro's comments about the US, focusing instead on his talks on regional matters with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leaders. Granma also ignored Obama's statements about Cuba, and dealt instead with Mexican President Felipe Calderon's call to drop the embargo.

And Fidel Castro, who still pens enormously influential columns from the sidelines of power, was silent on Friday.

Obama said a relationship frozen for 50 years “won't thaw overnight.” But their words seemed as historic as any that leaders of the two nations have made to one another.