EU leaning toward normal ties with Cuba: official

EU leaning toward normal ties with Cuba: official
03 November 2009, 22:52 CET
— filed under: Cuba, politics, diplomacy

(HAVANA) - Most EU member states want the European Union to resume
normal relations with communist Cuba, a European Union official said
Tuesday.

European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Karel De
Gucht, on a visit to Havana acknowledged that the issue remains
controversial for some EU members.

But normalization "is an opinion (favored by) most EU members," he said
after meetings here with senior Cuban officials.

The European Union has long urged Havana to open up its political and
economic system as a condition for normal relations, even though it
resumed some aid to the island last year.

Spain, however, is expected to push for full normalization when it
assumes leadership of the EU early next year, even though some EU
members insist on requiring some diplomatic or political gesture from
Havana as a condition for fully normalized ties.

Cuba, the only one-party communist regime in the Americas, rejects
political opening and has not launched a major economic opening in 50
years of revolutionary rule.

De Gucht, who met with council of ministers deputy Ricardo Cabrisas
Tuesday, called his meetings Monday with Foreign Minister Bruno
Rodriguez and Trade and Foreign Investment Minister Rodrigo Malmierca
"interesting."

The EU suspended ties after Cuba launched a major roundup of 75
dissidents in March 2003, but resumed aid cooperation in 2008.

Havana is dead set against the so-called Common Position of the EU
states which in 1996 called for human rights and democracy progress in
Cuba as a condition for normal relations with the European bloc.

EU leaning toward normal ties with Cuba: official — EU Business News -
EUbusiness.com (4 November 2009)
http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/cuba-politics.1a5