Will Spain make the EU go soft on Cuba?

Will Spain make the EU go soft on Cuba?
By Milan Nič
03.12.2009 / 07:00 CET
Spain wants to reward Cuba for defying the EU's wishes.

For the past 13 years the EU's member states have followed a common
policy on Cuba. That is about to change, if Spain has its way. It has
made clear it wants to end the EU's 'common position' during its
presidency of the EU, enabling member states to pursue bilateral
policies within a framework agreement with Cuba, such as the EU has with
China.

This should trouble anyone interested in human rights – including EU
foreign ministers, who said this June that they remained "seriously
concerned about the lack of progress in the situation of human rights in
Cuba".

Firstly, for the past two years Spain has itself pursued an independent,
bilateral policy – with no results, other than a few favourable business
contracts.

Secondly, without what amounts to a common code of conduct, some other
EU countries are likely to do as Spain has done: in breach of previous
EU commitments to make political engagement conditional, Spain's foreign
minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, has consistently refused to meet
dissidents during visits to Havana for fear of provoking the regime.

Thirdly, to normalise relations now would be to reward Havana for doing
exactly the opposite of what the EU demanded this June, "to release
unconditionally all political prisoners". (There are currently some
200.) Since then, the regime has pursued a course toward greater
centralisation, militarisation and – as Human Rights Watch documented in
a report in November – toward heavier repression (it has, for example,
imprisoned more than 40 people merely on suspicion that they are likely
to commit a crime).

The danger is that a broadly uniform EU position will be replaced by
national policies that feed the Cuban regime's perception that it can
dictate to European countries what is and is not acceptable. It is the
EU's common position that gives it leverage on human-rights issues.

Spain is testing the waters. There is, though, a growing current in the
direction it wants. Belgium, which will assume the EU's rotating
presidency in July, also has policies friendly to the regime of Fidel
and Raúl Castro. An increasing number of European ministers are visiting
Cuba, frequently not meeting dissidents. The European Commission has
done likewise, a point very evident this summer when Benita
Ferrero-Waldner, the outgoing commissioner for external affairs, visited
Havana. Shortly before, she had visited Belarus and made a specific
effort to meet dissidents; in Havana, she ignored them.

Spain is relying on this type of change in the political consensus so
that the entire framework of the EU's relations with Cuba can be
changed, since, if objective, the annual review planned for June will
conclude that Cuba is failing to meet the EU's current conditions.

But Spain is also, in effect, making Cuba one of the first tests for EU
foreign policy under the Lisbon treaty regime. One of the purposes of
the treaty was to forge greater unity on foreign policy, not to fragment it.

This is also a test for the European Parliament. It now has the power to
exercise its enhanced powers of oversight.

A fragmentation of EU policy matters not just to dissidents; it affects
ordinary Cubans' perceptions of Europe. I spent 18 March in Havana
watching the Ladies in White, the wives and relatives of jailed
dissidents, defy the police and protest quietly on the sixth anniversary
of the biggest crackdown of recent years. That same evening, Cubans
learnt from their television news that Louis Michel, then the European
commissioner for development, was happy with the direction of EU-Cuban
relations. During his high-profile visit, the cigar-puffing commissioner
refused to meet the Ladies in White, to whom the Parliament had awarded
its Sakharov Prize. The Commission's development department later said
it made this "scheduling mistake" because it was unaware of the date's
symbolism. Be that as it may, this episode demonstrated how a desire for
engagement that is blind to other considerations can lead to shame. If
Spain has its way, we will see more self-interested engagement, with
less progress on human rights.

Milan Nič is deputy director of the Pontis Foundation in Slovakia, which
provides humanitarian aid to the families of political prisoners in Cuba.

Will Spain make the EU go soft on Cuba? | Policies | Foreign
affairs | Americas | European Voice (3 December 2009)
http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/imported/will-spain-make-the-eu-go-soft-on-cuba-/66586.aspx?LG=1