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Cuba: Council Re-Election an Endorsement (AP) {Full Text] HAVANA - Cuba's re-election to the U.N. Human Rights Council is a recognition of the island's contribution to human rights around the world, Fidel Castro's government said Wednesday. Another three-year term for Cuba on the U.N. panel "is undoubtedly a recognition of the Cuban Revolution's work in human rights in favor of all our people," said a government statement published in the Communist Party daily Granma. It's an endorsement of "the contribution thousands of Cubans have made over four decades to the human rights of people in more than 100 countries," the statement added. Cuba said it presented 10 projects to the U.N. commission last year defending social rights and denouncing the burden of foreign debt on developing countries.

U.S. delegates walked out of a U.N. meeting in protest Tuesday when Cuba's re-election was announced. The communist country's election came weeks after Castro's government sentenced 75 dissidents to long prison terms on charges of collaborating with U.S. diplomats to undermine Cuba's socialist regime. It also followed the April 11 execution of three Cubans who hijacked a ferry packed with passengers in an attempt to reach the United States. No one was hurt in the hijacking. Governments and human rights groups worldwide condemned the executions and the crackdown. Cuba argued the executions were necessary to avoid a migration crisis provoked by the United States.

During this year's annual six-week session which ended Friday, the U.N.'s top human rights watchdog narrowly passed a resolution calling on Cuba to accept a visit by a human rights monitor but failed to approve an amendment criticizing Cuba's crackdown. Under U.N. rules, regional groups decide who fills seats on U.N. bodies.Latin America chose Cuba, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru for six open seats. Cuba said its re-election was a "victory" that "contrasted with the United States' embarrassing defeat in 2001" when the United States lost its place on the panel. The United States recovered its seat in 2002. Cuba has been on the 53-member U.N. rights commission since 1989. [End]

Cuba's crackdown and America's man in Havana *** Cuban officials became anxious as Mr Cason travelled to meet dissidents in their homes and invited them to his official residence. Mr Castro was piqued when Mr Cason - speaking outside the home of Marta Beatriz Roque, a now-imprisoned dissident - said Cuba was growing fearful of internal opposition. Two weeks later a defiant Mr Castro told the National Assembly that Cuba could "very easily do without the US interests section office". The offensive soon followed. William Leogrande, Dean of the School of Public Affairs at Washington DC's American University, called Mr Cason's "very public stand" the "catalyst" for the crackdown. "The dissidents were not well-served by Cason's very public embrace," he said. "It was as if he were throwing the gauntlet down to the Cuban regime."

Ties between the US interest section and the dissidents were used as trial evidence, as was the testimony of several Cuban security agents who infiltrated the movement. State-run media then published this testimony to discredit the dissidents as mercenaries bankrolled by the US.

While Mr Cason has expressed no regret for his activities, he has curtailed his public engagements while he and other officials reassess how best to support dissidents without jeopardising them. Mr Leogrande noted that remaining dissidents have developed "some effective models of resistance. The Castro regime has no hope of restoring the ideology of the 1970s and 1980s so, just as in eastern Europe, time is on the dissidents' side." But for now the arrests have thrown the dissident movement into a tailspin. Even when the Castro government was relatively permissive of dissident organising, few Cubans knew about their efforts or got involved. Recruitment is certain to be more difficult now that the movement has been criminalised, deeply infiltrated by state agents, and proved so easily dismantled. Vladimiro Roca, a leading Havana dissident and former political prisoner who has so far been spared in the crackdown, said: "Yes, some people may be afraid to join us and we have to rebuild. But what the government has done only reminds us that the future belongs to the dissidents, and that gives us strength. "The government says that we are insignificant groups, that we are 'minuscule'," Mr Roca said. "But what sort of hunter shoots a sparrow with a cannon?"***