Former Cuban president Fidel Castro said on Tuesday that Cuba had no desire to rejoin the Organization of American States (OAS), as called for by some of Cuba’s allies, and that he did not even want to “hear the vile name of that institution.”
Castro, in his third column published on Tuesday, said the OAS “has a history that collects all the trash of 60 years of betrayal of the people of Latin America.”
He said the organization had been involved in “aggressive actions” that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Cuba was suspended from the 35-member OAS in 1962 because the communist system created by Castro after he took power in a 1959 revolution was judged to be “incompatible” with the organization’s principles.
Castro has criticized the group for years, calling it the “Ministry of Colonies” of the US.
Before the OAS Summit of the Americas set to begin tomorrow in Trinidad and Tobago, several Latin American countries have said Cuba should be reinstated in the organization, which promotes regional cooperation and democracy.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told reporters in Rio de Janeiro on Monday that Cuba’s absence from the OAS “is an anomaly that needs to be corrected.”
OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza told Brazilian newspaper O Globo that Cuba must show its commitment to democracy to be readmitted.
“We need to know if Cuba is interested in returning to multilateral organizations or if it is thinking only about the end of the embargo and economic growth,” he told the newspaper, referring to the US trade embargo imposed on Cuba since 1962.
“It even offends us to suppose that we are desiring of entering the OAS. That train passed a while back and Insulza still doesn’t know it,” Castro said.
Castro, 82, has not been seen in public since intestinal surgery in July 2006. He ceded power to his brother, President Raul Castro, last year.
The first two of Fidel Castro’s columns on Tuesday dealt in part with Monday’s decision by US President Barack Obama to let Cuban-Americans travel freely to Cuba and send as much money as they want to relatives there.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
RSS