Uruguay Breaks Ties With Cuba

By RAUL GARCES - c The Associated Press, April 26, 2002

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) - Uruguay's president announced Tuesday that his country was breaking diplomatic ties with Cuba, days after Uruguay sponsored a U.N. human rights vote targeting Fidel Castro's government.

The surprise announcement by President Jorge Batlle came as the Uruguayan leader charged Cuba with a series of insults against this South American nation.

Cuban President Fidel Castro, who was speaking live on a government television program in Havana when the announcement was made, characterized Batlle as ``a lackey.''

Uruguay sponsored a resolution targeting Cuba that was passed Friday by the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. The vote was a tight 23-21 with nine abstentions.

The resolution invited the communist-run country to provide its people with greater civil and political rights. It also exhorted Cuba to allow a U.N. representative to visit the island - an idea Havana rejected.

Almost all Latin American nations on the 53-member commission approved the human rights measure, prompting Cuba to term them all ``Judases.''

Castro seemed unconcerned as he read the story about Uruguay aloud on air.

He said that that while Uruguay was breaking relations with Cuba, plans were under way to vaccinate 300,000 Uruguayan children with meningitis vaccines donated by Cuba to the South American country.

On Monday night, Castro had referred to Batlle as that ``hungover, abject Judas who presides over Uruguay.''

Leading up to the U.N. vote in Geneva, Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque accused Uruguay of ``genuflecting'' and of ``being servile'' to the United States by sponsoring the resolution.

At a news conference late Tuesday, Batlle bluntly complained that insults by Cuban leaders ``continued to escalate in tone'' to the point that Uruguay was forced to act.

``The rupture will remain until it is clear that the Cuban people have peace and liberty,'' Batlle bristled at the news conference in this South American capital.

Batlle said he instructed Foreign Minister Didier Opertti to carry out the necessary steps to formalize the break. He did not elaborate.

But Guillermo Valles, an undersecretary to Opertti, later told The Associated Press that Cuba's ambassador would be ordered to leave the country within 72 hours.

The Cuban ambassador to Uruguay, Jose J. Vazquez Portela, had no immediate comment. And there was no immediate word if Cuba would take any similar steps toward Uruguay.

Diplomatic relations between Uruguay and Cuba were restored in 1986, a year after the end of 12 years of right-wing military-dictatorship in Uruguay that had interrupted ties.

But relations fell on rocky times in the weeks leading up to the Geneva vote. Uruguay's government went so far as to recall its ambassador, Enrique Estrazulas, to show its displeasure.

Mexico's Fox suffers black eye in joust with Castro

By Andrew Hurst

MEXICO CITY, April 23 (Reuters) - Cuban President Fidel Castro has acutely embarrassed Mexico's President Vicente Fox and given Fox's critics more ammunition to use against him, analysts said on Tuesday.

But the Cuban leader has also come across as ungracious by flagrantly breaching international protocol and revealing, in an incident tinged with farce, details of a conversation both men had agreed in advance was private, the analysts said.

Castro said on Monday in a national broadcast that Fox lied about the Cuban leader's abrupt departure in March from a United Nations summit and played a tape of a confidential telephone conversation between the two men to prove the point.

A red-faced Mexican government has called unacceptable Castro's decision to broadcast the conversation but said it would not break off diplomatic relations, which have been under increasing strain in recent months.

Some critics ridiculed Castro's gambit, saying it was bombastic but ineffective.

"He (Castro) thinks it (the Fox government) is a house of cards and that with one gust of wind from the bearded lion it's going to fall down," said Federico Estevez, a political science professor at Mexico City's ITAM University.

Others believed Fox emerged with little credit from the affair by having been exposed as a fumbling liar. The Mexican president had always denied asking Castro to cut short his visit to Monterrey.

"When he asks Castro not to criticize Bush and the United States you have entered the world of the pathetic," said Dan Lund, an opinion pollster based in Mexico City, who heads a market research organization called Mund.

"It tends to make Fox look like someone who creates problems rather than solves then," he added.

CASTRO VENTS WRATH

Castro's attempt to humiliate Fox seemed to have been prompted by anger over Mexico breaking precedent and supporting a vote of censure of Cuba by the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Mexico's Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda said Castro was trying to use the dispute with Mexico to distract attention at home from the U.N. vote "which is producing a very complicated effect in Cuba."

"This ... is what Castro is trying to remedy by doing what he has always done ... deflecting attention from his internal problems," Castaneda told a radio network.

Mexico's opposition, dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which ruled Mexico for seven decades before Fox's 2000 election win, have been incensed by what they see as Fox's mishandling of once warm relations with Cuba.

The PRI, together with the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), have the whip hand in Congress where Fox's conservative National Action Party lacks an overall majority and has failed to make much headway with an ambitious reform agenda.

"Fox's legislative agenda will be further complicated by a recalcitrant Congress," said Delal Baer, a specialist on Mexican affairs at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

Fox's office canceled an interview scheduled for Wednesday with U.S. broadcasting network NBC in what appeared to be a sign of nervousness over the affair.

In the president-to-president conversation, Fox pleaded with Castro to leave the summit early and to refrain from saying anything to the conference that might offend President George W. Bush.

Thinking he had struck a deal with Castro, Fox asked the Cuban leader to stay for lunch with him in Monterrey before leaving. Fox's clear but unstated aim was to have Castro out of the way before Bush's arrival.

"So long as you don't serve me turkey in mole sauce and lots of food, because I will have to fly back here full," said Castro, in response to the lunch invitation.

Fox, who in the conversation always referred to Castro as Fidel while the Cuban leader addressed Fox respectfully as "president," assured Castro that he will be served "cabrito," a goat meat dish popular in Monterrey.

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