U.S. officials announced Wednesday the suspension of bilateral migration talks with Cuba in a further sign of deteriorating relations between the two nations.
U.S. officials said the talks, which occur every six months and were scheduled to begin Thursday in Havana, were canceled because Cuban officials refused to discuss several key issues involving an accord governing the legal flow of migrants from Cuba to the U.S. Among the issues is Cuba’s failure to grant exit visas to about 200 Cubans who had been issued permanent entry visas by the United States.
“We have told Cuba that we’re ready to go to talks when they’re ready to discuss the serious issues that need to be discussed,” Richard Boucher, the U.S. State Department spokesman, said in Washington. “Unfortunately, the Cubans have continued to refuse to discuss the issues that we’ve identified.”
The Cuban Foreign Ministry blamed the United States for the breakdown in talks, adding that the U.S. is seeking “new pretexts to aggravate tensions between the two countries.”
Cuba said the Bush administration is bowing to pressure from “ultra-reactionary” elements in the Cuban-American community whose “vengeance and hate” for the Cuban government do not represent “the true national interests of the United States.”
“Cuba ratifies that it has been and is disposed to seriously discuss, with the depth and the time required, all of the subjects mentioned by the North American authorities,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement published Wednesday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma.
Diplomats and experts said it was in neither country’s interest to permanently end the talks, which are part of a migratory accord signed in the mid-1990s that allows 20,000 Cubans to immigrate legally to the United States each year.
The accord, reached after the 1994 rafters crisis in which tens of thousands of Cubans tried to cross the Florida Strait, was designed to prevent another mass exodus of Cubans to U.S. shores.
“It’s obvious the U.S. doesn’t want a migratory crisis, and the Cubans are worried that if this happened again they would be in big trouble,” said one European diplomat in Havana.
Experts said the suspension of the talks illustrates the overall deterioration in relations between Cuban President Fidel Castro and the Bush administration during the past year.
Seeking to isolate Cuba further, U.S. officials have sharply reduced the number of Americans allowed to visit the island legally while vowing to increase enforcement of the four-decade-old U.S. trade embargo.
U.S. officials also have expressed concern that Castro is seeking to foment unrest throughout the region.
“Those that continue in destabilizing democratically elected governments, interfering in the internal affairs of other governments, are playing with fire,” warned Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.
Castro has responded to the Bush administration with typical defiance, saying that any U.S. aggression toward the island would be met by “millions of combatants.”
The Cuban president also vigorously opposes the proposed hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas, one of Bush’s most important foreign policy initiatives in the region.
“The U.S. is very concerned because of Cuba’s effectiveness in turning Latin America against the free-trade proposal and its hostility to U.S. policy in the region,” said Hans de Salas-del Valle, a research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.
U.S. officials said the talks were broken off over five issues. In addition to the delay on exit visas for Cubans approved to live in the U.S., American officials complain that Cuba has not allowed them to check on the welfare of hundreds of Cubans repatriated to the island since the political crackdown in Cuba last spring.
U.S. officials say another problem is Cuba’s refusal to hold a new registration for a lottery from which two-thirds of all legal immigrants are chosen. U.S. officials argue that a new registration is needed to include younger Cubans who were not eligible when the last one took place in 1998.
The U.S. also wants access to a deeper port to allow Coast Guard cutters to repatriate illegal migrants and Havana’s cooperation in accepting migrants who have committed crimes in the United States.
But Wayne Smith, a former top U.S. diplomat in Havana, described the U.S. complaints as “specious” and said the decision to break off the talks was “ominous.”
“I see this as indicating yet again that the U.S. is moving away from dialogue and more and more toward regime change, and no good will come of that,” Smith said.
