Havana accuses Washington of promoting destabilization

By Gerardo Arreola

From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada

HAVANA – The Cuban Foreign Ministry called “illegal” the courses on computing and the connections to the Internet offered here by the United States Interests Section and accused the government of that country of seeking in that manner the “internal destabilization” of the island.

The ministry warned that it “will utilize all the legal mechanisms at [its] disposal” to enforce the laws.

The U.S. office, whose diplomatic rank is below an embassy’s, offers courses on computer use and makes computer terminals available to opponents of the Cuban government.

Those activities have been known for years. However, the ministry’s statement casts light on one of the touchiest issues of the bilateral dispute at a time when Havana can make its position very visible: on the eve of the presidential elections in the U.S. and the annual vote in the United Nations against Washington’s economic blockade.

Among other events, the USIS announced last June that it had graduated 26 “aspirants to independent journalists” in a course titled “Introduction to Journalism” given through teleconferences by teachers at the Florida International University. In March, the USIS reported a virtual meeting between editors of the opposition website Cubanet, based in the U.S., and “independent bloggers and journalists” on the island.

The ministry stated that the courses are held so that the attendees may “act against the interests of the Cuban State,” in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the local laws, and the accords that led to the establishment of the USIS itself.

Washington and Havana, which broke diplomatic relations in 1961, opened their Interest Sections in 1977 for the purpose of handling consular matters. The U.S. government maintains a budget allocation “to promote democracy” in Cuba that in essence is used to foment actions against the island’s government.

In its communiqué, the ministry said that the USIS “continues to act as the headquarters of the policy of subversion of the government of the United States” against the island, to “fabricate a movement of opposition to the government of Cuba and foment destabilization to provoke a ‘regime change’ in our country.”