Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS: Tensions Ease as Argentina Pledges Not to Censure Cuba

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 27 2004 (IPS) - Cuba can rest a bit easier knowing that its Latin American ally Argentina will not vote to censure the island nation in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights this year.

In the 1990s, the Argentine votes in favour of censure had pushed bilateral relations to the breaking point.

The Néstor Kirchner government has made it know that it will abstain from voting on any resolution condemning the Fidel Castro government’s human rights record. Such resolutions have become an annual event of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, visiting Argentina through Sunday, describes the current ties between his country and Argentina as "excellent".

Over the past 40 years they have been marked by pressures from the United States, which has constantly sought allies against Havana, and by the ups and downs of Argentina’s domestic politics, including its recurring military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s.

Pérez Roque met with Kirchner and Argentina’s foreign minister, Rafael Bielsa, leading to agreements to improve trade and find means for Cuba to pay its debt to Argentina. They also discussed Latin American integration and human rights issues.

"The frictions of the past have been overcome," said the Cuban foreign minister, referring to the years when Argentina favoured cultivating stronger ties with the United States and voted against Cuba on United Nations resolutions on human rights.

In contrast, this representative of the Fidel Castro government harshly criticised the president of Uruguay, Jorge Batlle, whose administration has already stated it will once again support a censure of Cuba on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which begins its annual sessions on Mar. 15 in Geneva.

Batlle "acts as an agent in the service of foreign powers. He looks to the United States instead of to his partners in Mercosur (Southern Common Market)," said Pérez Roque, underscoring that Uruguay is contradicting the positions taken by its partners in the trade bloc, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

Pérez Roque’s statements are an indication of the degree to which the votes in the U.N. human rights arena are a thorn in the side of the Castro government, affecting its relations with the rest of Latin America and, in turn, their relations with the United States.

"It doesn’t matter that the human rights situation in Cuba hasn’t changed one iota, the relationship between (Argentina and Cuba) and the vote in the U.N. vary in function of the needs of domestic politics," political science professor Juan Tokatlián, of Argentina’s University of San Andrés, told IPS.

He says ties between states increasingly seem to be above the issue of respect for human rights, evident in the cases of Cuba, China, Sudan and Zimbabwe. "Unfortunately, there is a double standard of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violators of human rights."

The Kirchner administration’s position with respect to Havana consolidates the change anticipated in 2003 by interim president Eduardo Duhalde, who was designated by parliament to serve out the term of Fernando de la Rúa when he resigned from the presidency.

Duhalde instructed the Argentine representative on the U.N. commission to abstain from a vote to censure Cuba during the six-week sessions last year.

"That was the turning point," says political analyst Rosendo Fraga, with the Buenos Aires-based Centre for the New Majority.

"During the Carlos Menem government (1989-1999) and under De la Rúa (1999-2001), Argentina condemned the Castro government, but then last year it joined Brazil in abstaining from the vote" on whether to censure Cuba for its human rights record, Fraga told IPS.

Before that, Menem had made alignment with Washington one of the mainstays of his foreign policy, and De la Rúa maintained that line despite having promised change to his constituents and allies of the centre-left.

It was then that Castro described De la Rúa as "bootlicker of the Yankees (United States)", prompting the Argentine government to recall its ambassador in Havana. A few months later, at the end of 2001, the president resigned after two years of his four-year term, forced out by massive protests and Argentina’s economic collapse.

So it was up to Duhalde in early 2002 to decide, and he instructed the Argentine representative to vote on the U.N. resolution on Cuba’s human rights just as his predecessors had done: condemning the Castro government’s record.

"Duhalde was desperate, and took up the Cuba issue as a sort of transactional move in hopes of getting a wink from Washington," says Tokatlián.

But "when he realised that there was nothing to be gained, and although Cuba did not change anything, Duhalde modified his approach in 2003, calling for abstention. But that decision was due to frustration in failing to garner support for his government and to the weight that the issue had on the eve of local elections," added the political scientist.

After consulting with the then recently inaugurated president of Brazil, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, Duhalde said Argentina would not censure "a small country under embargo", considering it "inopportune" at a time when the United States had launched against Iraq "a unilateral and human rights violating war."

Meanwhile, as the March-April period of sessions of the Commission on Human Rights were under way in Geneva, Cuban authorities rounded up 75 rights activists in dissidents who were sentenced to up to 28 years in prison on charges of ”conspiring with a foreign power (the United States) to subvert the internal order”.

And in April on the Caribbean island, three men who hijacked a ferry in an attempt to defect to the United States were executed by firing squad after a summary trial.

Kirchner, who was sworn in as president on May 25, 2003 after Menem withdrew from the run-off vote, had announced during the campaign his intention that Argentina would abstain from censuring Cuba in 2004, in harmony with the anti-U.S. feeling of much of the Argentine electorate at the time, who believed Washington had abandoned them in allowing the country to collapse in late 2001.

And following those lines, the Argentine foreign minister refused to meet with dissidents during a visit to the socialist-run island in October 2003, a decision that drew the ire of the United States.

The U.S. assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, Roger Noriega, himself of Cuban origins, said that the United States was "disappointed and concerned" by Argentina’s attitude. The U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires had said as much when Duhalde ordered abstention from the U.N. commission vote on Cuba in April 2003.

But during Pérez Roque’s current visit to Argentina, foreign minister Bielsa reportedly told his Cuban counterpart that the dissidents should be attended to.

Meanwhile, Patricio Echegaray, secretary-general of the Argentine Communist Party, says the changes in relations with Cuba under the Kirchner administration are very limited.

"We believe that if the government wants to have a truly independent foreign policy it must vote in favour of Cuba, and not just abstain" from the U.N. human rights vote, he told IPS.

But a look at the history of bilateral relations suggests that such a move would only be possible if Argentina had really cooled ties with the United States, and that is not the case. Despite his critical rhetoric towards Washington, Kirchner maintains cordial relations with his U.S. counterpart, George W. Bush.

"Relations between Argentina and Cuba have been extremely variable since the Cuban revolution was consolidated in the 1960s," says Tokatlián.

"The ups and downs were always conditioned by Cuba’s human rights policy, the dynamic of international relations in general, but also by local politics," he said.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the abrupt changes in policies towards Cuba were the result of the alternating democratic governments and military dictatorships in Argentina.

Originating in that era is the debt Havana owes Buenos Aires, which, with accumulated interest, now reaches 2.0 billion dollars. The debt was a loan from the Justicialista (Peronist) government in 1973 for Cuba to purchase vehicles and farm equipment.

The negotiations under way between the two governments involve a possible agreement in the health arena, giving Argentines the opportunity to seek treatment in Cuba for certain serious medical conditions – treatment they would otherwise not be able to afford at home, or for which Argentina lacks the technology.