Bringing Cuba in from the cold
An editorial from the Boston Globe
The invitation to membership extended to Cuba Wednesday by the Organization of American States was long overdue. The United States’ effort to continue Cuba’s exclusion from the OAS was at best a historical anomaly, at worst a blunder that isolated not Cuba but the United States.
So there was something anachronistic about the stance Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck Tuesday at the OAS annual general assembly in Honduras. Cuba could one day be admitted as a member, she said, but not until it meets “our standards of democracy and governance.”
This kind of incrementalism might have suited the domestic political needs of the Obama administration, which has enough problems on its plate without antagonizing the old anti-Castro lobby. But Clinton’s temporizing looked like old-fashioned hypocrisy to other OAS members.
The 1962 OAS resolution crafted to keep Cuba out was a blunt text. It rejected any state guilty of Marxism-Leninism, an ideology “incompatible with the inter-American system.” In Honduras, the Obama administration ought to have joined with the rest of OAS members when they rescinded that Cold War relic by general acclamation.
Once the 1962 resolution was cast aside, the sole basis for the U.S. hesitation to accept Cuba into the OAS was a democratic charter of 2001. It is right to ask Cuba to abide by the criteria of that charter — free elections, pluralism, and multiparty democracy.
However, the peoples of the region remember all too well Washington’s record of support for vicious, repressive dictatorships in this hemisphere, including Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, Anastasio Somoza’s in Nicaragua, and the Argentine military junta that waged a notorious U.S.-backed “dirty war” against domestic opponents from 1976 to 1983. This is why Clinton’s otherwise defensible reference to the charter’s democratic criteria could appear hypocritical to other OAS members.
President Obama has wisely begun unraveling the old knot of U.S.-Cuba enmity. He has lifted restrictions on travel to the island by Cuban-Americans and allowed money transfers to family members there. He recently authorized talks with the Castro government on immigration matters and the restoration of direct-mail service. The project of achieving normal relations between the United States and Cuba must begin with small, incremental steps of this kind.
But Washington was alone among the 34 OAS members in wanting to retain the ban against Havana. Given that Cuba’s official newspaper has called the OAS “a stinking corpse” and that the organization is asking Havana for democratic reforms, the looming question is whether the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, want to belong to a club that would want them as members.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
