MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

OAS can’t agree on Cuba, while Havana ridicules the organization

“OAS is a political corpse and should be buried as soon as possible”, says Cuba

The task force created by the Organization of American States, OAS, in an attempt to bridge different members’ proposals to consider the readmission of Cuba seems to have stalled with the main actors clearly underlining their stance.

The US said on Friday it would not back Cuba's full participation in OAS until the Castro regime makes democratic reforms. Cuba in the official government newspaper ridiculed OAS.

“It's really up to Cuba whether or not they join the OAS” said US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. Although Cuba is still a member of the organization, the US has effectively vetoed Havana's active role since 1962.

“They have to take certain concrete steps, in order to meet democratic principles that define OAS membership” said Kelly.

A majority of Latinamerican countries have backed a resolution to re-admit Cuba ahead of the OAS' general assembly in Honduras next week. But while a group of countries believes it’s enough with lifting the ban, others, including the US, feel certain steps have to be taken into consideration.

The different proposals led to the creation of the task force earlier this week in an attempt to reach a consensus. Nicaragua and Honduras sponsored a proposal to annul the 1962 resolution suspending Cuba from OAS, but the US, Costa Rica and others feel it must be a consensus decision. Peru said it was working on an “alternative” proposal.

But even with or without US backing, Cuba has indicated it does not want to return to the OAS fold. Granma, the official Communist party newspaper, on Friday said that Cuba would “never” return to the “pestilent corpse” that is the OAS.

“Cuba does not need the OAS. It does not want it, reformed or not. Blood and infamy ooze out of every one of its pores. We will never return to that old run-down old house of Washington, witness to so much selling-out and so many humiliations. President Raúl Castro expressed it with the words of Martí: Before we enter the OAS, the North Sea would have to unite with the South Sea and a snake will be born from an eagle’s egg”, said the Granma piece.

Further on it argues that “dismantling OAS and founding a new organization of Latin American and Caribbean countries, without the United States, would be the only way for Latin America and the Caribbean to decide their destiny without endangering their identity and making real progress toward a great united homeland, which Martí and Bolívar indicated as a historic goal”.

“OAS is a political corpse and should be buried as soon as possible. However, there is no lack of those who, in their zeal to bring back the dead, are seeking to rectify matters by “allowing Cuba to live,” restoring to it the place that never should have been taken from it within the OAS. All sorts of technicalities have been brought into play, such as the argument that it was the Cuban government, not the country, which was excluded, as if the legal entity of the state were separable from its very existence”, points out Granma.

The fact is that the US is facing pressure from Latinamerican countries who are keen to thaw the Cold War diplomatic deep freeze between the two countries, which still demonizes continental ties.

“The great majority of Latinamerican and Caribbean countries want Cuba to be reincorporated immediately with no conditions” said Peter Hakim of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.

“The US, and perhaps Canada and a few others, want Cuba to open its politics and meet OAS standards regarding democracy and human rights,” he said.