Mexico and Cuba Protest Hotel's Expulsion of Havana Delegation

February 7, 2006
Mexico and Cuba Protest Hotel's Expulsion of Havana Delegation
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 6 — Mexico and Cuba criticized the United States on
Monday for demanding that the Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel here order a
group of Cuban officials, who were meeting last week with
representatives of American oil companies, to check out of the hotel and
leave the premises.

On Friday, the United States Treasury Department contacted the company
that owns the Sheraton and warned them that they were violating federal
laws against trading with Cuba by allowing the meeting to take place in
their hotel.

The hotel told the Cuban representatives to leave, and sent their room
deposits to the Treasury Department. The meeting was moved to a hotel
not owned by an American company.

The American action has provoked a minor storm. Mayor Alejandro Encinas
of Mexico City, a member of the left-wing Party of the Democratic
Revolution, said Monday morning that he would ask his prosecutors to
find out if the hotel had broken local antidiscrimination laws and seek
to shut it down if it had.

Then, the Mexican foreign minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, said the idea
that a United States law was being enforced on Mexican soil was
troubling. He said the government would take action against the hotel if
it proved true. "There does not exist and neither should there exist the
extraterritorial application of this law in our nation," he said.

Cuba also lambasted the United States in an editorial in the state-run
newspaper, Granma, saying that forcing the Cubans to leave the Sheraton
had amounted to a "petty meanness" and represented "an outrage" against
Mexican sovereignty.

"The tentacles of the blockade and the United States' criminal economic
war against Cuba tend to extend themselves to every corner of the
planet, including to the detriment of the sovereignty and laws of other
states," the editorial said.

Various Mexican politicians, among them Felipe Calderón, the candidate
for president from President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, joined
the chorus of criticism.

Any whiff of American intervention in Mexico tends to set off a
political firestorm here. Taking umbrage at American arrogance is a
national pastime for politicians. The loss of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico
and California during the war with the United States in 1848 is still an
issue here.

On Friday, the Treasury Department informed Starwood Hotels, which owns
the Sheraton, that it was violating the Trading with the Enemy Act and
the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992. These laws prohibit United States
companies or their overseas subsidiaries from providing services to
Cuban individuals or companies.

"The hotel in Mexico City is a U.S. subsidiary, and therefore prohibited
from providing a service to Cuba or Cuban nationals," said Brookly
McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Treasury. "In this instance, we are
simply following our usual procedures, applying the law."

Judith Bryan, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy here, said it
was unclear whether the State Department had been consulted before the
Treasury contacted Starwood.

Cuba is trying to entice American oil companies into deals to drill off
the island's shore, just as it has with Chinese, Spanish and Brazilian
oil-exploration enterprises. The meeting of largely Texan oil executives
and elite bureaucrats from Havana ended Saturday. Among the companies
represented were Exxon Mobil and the Valero Energy Corporation.

Ricardo Ruiz Suárez, a spokesman for the Mexico City government, said
the hotel's owners could be prosecuted under several Mexican laws that
ban discrimination based on national origin or ideology.

"There are laws, federal as well as local, that obligate service
providers to provide those services in a general manner, without any
discriminatory attitudes," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/international/americas/07mexico.html