Brazilian Minister of Foreign Relations Celso Amorim gave an interview of interest to those following Cuba’s foreign relations to Colombian daily El Tiempo this week. The whole interview is available (in Spanish) here, but I’ve translated below the section that deals with Cuba’s entrance into the OAS (which I blogged about earlier this month).
We couldn’t ask Cuba for any kind of conditionality [to re-enter the OAS], because that would have implied a new judgment against the Cuban government, and instead of getting better, the situation would have gotten worse. It also couldn’t have been an automatic thing, especially considering that Cuba is now saying that it doesn’t want to return, so there will have to be a dialogue about that. But, on top of that, we had to make sure we had a consensus. That was very most important. You asked whose initiative it was and I don’t know. The General Secretary of the OAS? The ALBA countries? Ours? When Mr. Insulza was in Brazil, we talked about how it should be. The Chancellor of Honduras also visited me to talk about that. Everything took its form without having confrontations with the U.S.
It still worries believers in democracy, however, that Cuba’s return to the OAS has been facilitated without any promise of political freedom on the island.
Look: when the resolution excluding Cuba from the OAS was approved, it was the era of the Stroessners, the Trujillos, the Papa Docs. So, it didn’t have anything to do with democracies, but rather exclusively the East-West conflict. All the references in the operative section that were used in the 1962 resolution were about Marxism-Leninism and its incompatibility with the American system. It it were about democracy, many countries, including Brazil, which in that era had a military regime, would have been suspended from the OAS for many years. The other issue is if Cuba is going to say yes or no. Naturally, if Cuba wants to enter the OAS, it will have enter as the OAS is and that is written in the organization’s documents.
In other words, with a philosophy of politically openness…
With an OAS philosophy. When one wants to join a club, well one has to play by its rules, which speak of representative democracy. But even countries with governments like Pinochet’s of the military government of Brazil were never expelled. So, when it comes to the OAS’s principles, there are interpretations of interpretations.
Photo of Celso Amorim: Agência Brasil (archive)
