OAS lifts decades-old ban on Cuba

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(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-06-04 13:46

MEXICO CITY -- The Organization of American States (OAS) Wednesday unanimously voted in favor of revoking Cuba's exclusion from the organization at the 39th OAS general assembly in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula.

According to information reaching here, many Latin American countries celebrated the OAS resolution and regarded it as historic.

Cuba's President Raul Castro (L) and Paraguay's President Fernando Lugo review the honor guard during an official reception ceremony at Havana's Revolution Palace June 3, 2009. [Agencies]

At the start of the meeting's plenary session, Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas said that "it is resolved that resolution six, adopted on January 31, 1962, at the eighth Foreign Ministers Consultative Meeting, which excluded the Cuban government from participation in the Inter-American system is ruled null and void for the OAS."

In his address to the assembly, Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya said "we are all completely in agreement. The cold war has ended here in San Pedro Sula."

Debate on the text had been so heated that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walked out of the 10-hour meeting on Tuesday. However, in early hours of Wednesday, her deputy Thomas A. Shannon, assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, approved the resolution unchanged.

Shannon told the media on Wednesday that "we have eliminated one obstacle to Cuba's reintegration to the OAS, and we have established a compromise with Cuba, a path toward the future based on OAS principles, values and practices."

In Argentina, President Cristina Fernandez said that the decision of the OAS on annulling "the sanction against Cuba set many years ago was historic."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said at national TV and radio broadcast that the OAS decision "asserted and recognized the revolutionary Cuba."

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said that the revocation of that exclusion represented "an assertion to Cuba, to its people, to Commander Fidel Castro and the historical direction of the Revolution."

Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Fander Falconi said at the Assembly that Cuba had been isolated due to US pressure, in breach of international law as applied in the Americas, during 1962's eighth meeting of OAS foreign ministers held in Uruguay's capital Montevideo.

"It is time to see us, all the nations of the Americas, to regard each other with respect and in equality, to honor our differences and seek to complement each other, to rectify our mistakes and build the new institutions which our dream of regional integration demands," Falconi said.

Chilean Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez said that "it is a truly historic moment for the OAS. As it is known, Chile did not approve the sanction in 1962 and in that sense, our country celebrates the lifting of it."

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega also said on Wednesday that "we are not making it a favor, because Cuba is not interested on re-entering the OAS, Cuba has fought a battle, a heroic one for 50 years, facing many aggressions from the United States, that is why it deserves our recognition."

Meanwhile in Cuba, Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo said that "whatever we do at the OAS will not be enough, compared with all what Cuba has suffered in the last 50 years."

Lugo added that "we have learnt a lot from the dignity of this (Cuban) people, able to resist the embargo and to keep itself alive and with solidarity as an example for many countries."

Cuba's top officials have repeatedly said that they have little or no interest in returning to the body. In a newspaper column published earlier Wednesday, Cuban former leader Fidel Castro again described the body as a US Trojan horse.

Cuba was the topic that caught most attention at the assembly, although the main topic for discussion was supposed to be non-violence.