By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Nov 7 2007 (IPS)

U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler’s visit to Cuba left the door open to future visits by other high-level U.N. Human Rights Council officials, after several years of tension with Havana.

"Other rapporteurs will be invited by the Cuban government. I am not an exception," Ziegler told journalists shortly before returning to Geneva late Tuesday after an 11-day fact-finding mission.

Ziegler, a Swiss professor of sociology, will draw up a report with the conclusions from his trip. But in a preliminary assessment, he said the right to being fed is clearly the top political priority in Cuba, where "we haven&#39t seen a single malnourished person" – a rare accomplishment in Latin America. He also praised Cuba’s creativity in coming up with solutions to feed its people.

His work agenda, which he described as "very busy," included visits to several provinces, farms, and two prisons in Havana – where he asked inmates about the food they received – as well as meetings with Vice President Carlos Lage and other officials.

The special rapporteur said he had been able to talk to "all kinds of people." In the central Cuban city of Santa Clara, he was able to have impromptu conversations, for example, with people who were buying food in a "bodega", the government distribution centres where people receive food allotted by ration cards.

Studies have shown that the ration cards covered the basic needs of families until the late 1980s, but that they now fall short. At any rate, the system guarantees every Cuban citizen the right to food.

Ziegler, an outspoken critic of the four-decade U.S. embargo against Cuba, said this Caribbean island nation is the only developing country to have already met the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The eight MDGs, adopted by U.N. member countries in 2000, are halving extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women, reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters and infant mortality by two-thirds, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, adopting an environmentally sustainable development model, and building a global partnership for development. They have a 2015 target date, based on 1990 levels. The U.N. expert pointed out that Cuba dedicates large amounts of scarce foreign exchange to ensuring that Cubans are fed. He also said officials and farmers are keen on increasing production in order to reduce food imports.

The Cuban government invited Ziegler to visit the country after the Human Rights Council terminated the mandate of the personal representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on the situation of human rights in Cuba, Christine Chanet.

Chanet was appointed in 2002, but was never allowed to visit Cuba to produce her reports, because Havana saw her designation as forming part of a U.S. maneuver.

For years, Cuba’s human rights record has sparked harsh confrontations between the Cuban and U.S. delegations in Geneva, where the U.N. Commission on Human Rights – replaced in 2006 by the Human Rights Council – was based.

"His visit is an expression of our commitment to cooperating with non-discriminatory, unbiased universal human rights mechanisms exercised equally by all," said Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque when he met with Ziegler in the Foreign Ministry on Nov. 1.

The minister also reiterated the government’s willingness to receive other U.N. special rapporteurs in the future, if Cuba continues to receive respectful treatment, as equals.

"We hope that another rapporteur can visit us next year, and that the visits can be systematic and continuous, in an atmosphere free of discriminatory treatment and politicisation of the issue against Cuba," he said.

Cuba is one of the 47 members of the Human Rights Council, in which, according to Ziegler, it plays a "very active and dynamic" role. He added that Cuba is studying the possibility of signing the international covenants on economic, social and cultural, and civil and political, rights.

The special rapporteur, who reached Havana on Oct. 28, described the dire situation of hunger in the world, where 100,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes.

He said that instead of diminishing, as the world approaches the 2015 deadline for the MDG of halving the proportion of hungry people, the number of malnourished people across the globe is actually increasing.

Ziegler’s trip to Cuba was the first by a U.N. special rapporteur in eight years. In 1999, Havana invited the special rapporteurs on violence against women and the use of mercenaries.

And in November 1994, José Ayala Lasso, the first U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, made a four-day visit to the island, meeting with President Fidel Castro, who stepped aside in July 2006 after emergency intestinal surgery, handing power over to his brother Raúl.

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