Friday, February 10, 2012

Cuba Wants To Attend Upcoming Americas Summit; US Rejects Idea

Cuba Wants To Attend Upcoming Americas Summit; US Rejects Idea
FEBRUARY 10, 2012, 8:20 A.M. ET

BOGOTA (Dow Jones)--Colombia's foreign minister said Thursday Cuba wants
to attend the upcoming 34-nation Summit of the Americas, an idea
immediately dismissed by the U.S. on the grounds the island nation isn't
democratic.

"They told me, obviously, that they're interested in attending,"
Colombian Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin said in Bogota upon
returning from Cuba, where she met with the Communist nation's
president, Raul Castro.

Colombia will play host to the summit April 14-15 in the Caribbean
resort city of Cartagena, and U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to
attend.

It'll be the sixth such hemisphere-wide gathering of heads of states
going back to the 1990s. Communist-ruled Cuba has never been invited,
although it sometimes has sent to the event representatives who hold
their own meetings and protests outside the gates of the official event.

On Saturday, Ecuador President Rafael Correa called on left-leaning
nations in the region to boycott the summit if Cuba isn't included. The
summit is organized by the Organization of American States.

Holguin said Colombia will hold diplomatic meetings with other OAS
member nations over the coming weeks to see about the possibility of
Cuba getting an invite to the summit.

"We're going to look into it," she said, adding that the meetings will
be closed-door.

For the U.S. government, any suggestion that Cuba be invited is a
nonstarter.

"The countries of the Americas, by consensus at the 2001 Quebec Summit,
made clear the Summit process is open only to democratic countries," the
U.S. Embassy in Bogota said in an emailed statement Thursday. "The U.S.
supports that shared commitment and looks forward to the day when a
democratic Cuba takes its rightful seat at a Summit of the Americas.
Sadly, that day has not yet come."

-By Dan Molinski, Dow Jones Newswires

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120210-708631.html

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