Vol. 73/No. 23      June 15, 2009

According to the May 21 Globe and Mail, Ottawa’s decision was “a diplomatic tit-for-tat response to Cuba canceling a visit earlier this month by Peter Kent, Canada’s Minister of State for the Americas.” Cuba’s decision was made after Kent had indicated his intention to denounce Cuba’s government during his trip for “lack of human rights” in the socialist country.

Kent echoed widely reported statements made in April by Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, held in Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. Along with Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony, Cuba was the only country from the hemisphere excluded from the gathering. Several heads of state from Latin America attending the summit denounced the 47-year-old economic embargo imposed on Cuba by the U.S. government.

While describing himself as “an anti-Communist Conservative,” Harper reiterated Canada’s rulers’ long-held stance toward the Cuban Revolution. “If one wants to break down a state-socialist economic nationalist model with walls,” he said, “I don’t think a trade embargo is the way to do that.”

“That said,” he added, “we don’t turn a blind eye to the fact that Cuba is a communist dictatorship and that we want to see progress on freedom, democracy, and human rights as well as on economic matters.”

In the April 17 issue of Granma, the daily paper of the Communist Party of Cuba, former Cuban president Fidel Castro wrote that Harper has been the only head of state at the event to have been “ill-mannered toward Cuba.”

In a presentation she gave May 16 to the annual general assembly of the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba here in Montreal, Cuba’s ambassador to Canada, Teresita de Jesús Vicente, reported that the Cuban government officially protested Harper’s comments as “offensive.”
 
 
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