By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Sep 6 2002 (IPS)

The outgoing chief of the United States Interests Section in Cuba, Vicki Huddleston, stated Friday just hours before returning to her country that changes in the island’s socialist regime are already under way and are “inevitable”.

Nobody is going to stop history, Huddleston said in her last foreign press conference before heading back to the United States after a three-year tenure as Washington’s top diplomat here.

Huddleston, who will reportedly begin as Washington’s ambassador to Mali next month, is replaced in Havana by James Cason, another career diplomat who, according to the U.S. media, is known for his “conciliatory” attitude.

Cason’s diplomatic history includes stints in Honduras, Bolivia and Jamaica.

Huddleston was the first woman to serve as head of the U.S. Interests Section and also the first to hold the post with the rank of ambassador.

The U.S. office in Havana was set up in 1977 after the two countries signed an agreement that also created a similar office for Cuba in Washington. The two neighbours have not had full diplomatic relations since the Fidel Castro regime began in 1960.

From 1989 to 1993, Huddleston led the Office of Cuban Affairs at the U.S. State Department and took the helm of the Interests Section in Havana in September 1999.

“I remember well when I first visited here 10 or 13 years ago. Everything has changed,” said the diplomat, who predicts that Cuba will transition into a democracy and will become “the engine of the Caribbean”.

Huddleston said she has seen changes in civil society and that human rights activists are now better known among the public. There are now independent libraries and the churches are active in areas that have been controlled by the state, such as the news.

“Changes continue in Cuba,” and it does not matter if the Castro government wants them to or not, said the diplomat, whose presence in this country became more visible since George W. Bush became U.S. president in January 2001.

Her work since then has been characterised by public and outspoken support for dissidents in Cuba, which the Castro administration describes as “tiny groups in the service of the Empire (United States).”

She has also travelled throughout the country and has attended public events without notifying the authorities beforehand.

This new approach, which included her campaign to distribute hundreds of short-wave radios to the population to facilitate reception of the U.S. government station Radio Martí, rankled the Cuban authorities, who accused Huddleston of interfering in the island’s domestic affairs.

Huddleston abandoned all protocol to dedicate herself to “the most vile operations of recruiting agents among the assiduous of the paid dissidence movement and candidates for emigration,” according to Granma newspaper, considered the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party.

The diplomat responded that accusations that the United States is financing opposition groups on the island are “a lie of the Cuban state” aimed at discrediting the dissident movement.

“In my three years here, I never made suggestions to the dissidents. They have their own plans,” she added.

Non-governmental organisations and other governments have the right and the duty to help the opposition with material, information and computers, as they did with those of Eastern Europe before the dismantling of the socialist bloc in the early 1990s, according to Huddleston.

Such aid should serve so that the opposition can makes its ideas known to the Cuban population, she said.

“It is very unfair that the government controls everything,” said the diplomat, adding that the Cuban people currently lack the opportunity to hear different opinions than those of the government-run media.

In order to ensure peaceful change, the people have to take decisions, she said, and to do so they must have the opportunity to education themselves on the issues.

Thursday, Huddleston hosted a farewell reception, where she presented three of her Cuban guests with new radios equipped with antennae to receive foreign broadcasts, four rechargeable batteries and a charger.

“Those who don’t want soup get three bowls full,” commented a Latin American diplomat afterwards.

Among those who gathered to bid their farewells to the U.S. ambassador was Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project.

That initiative, presented in May to the National Assembly — the Cuban Congress — with the signatures of 11,000 Cuban citizens, proposes calling a referendum on freedoms of expression and association, a new electoral law, general elections and amnesty for political prisoners.

Huddleston criticised Castro for preventing the proposal from being publicly announced and for launching his own campaign to gather what the government claims were signatures of 90 percent of the island’s population of 11.2 million to support a constitutional reform making the socialist system “untouchable”.

In Huddleston’s opinion, the Castro administration revealed its “weakness” with that move, which, she said, cost it a great deal “of credibility in the international community.”

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