Sen. Coleman Pays Cuba Human Rights Call [Full Text] HAVANA - Sen. Norm Coleman, visiting Cuba on Sunday, backed away from earlier calls to end sanctions on the communist country, saying that lifting the restrictions now would send the wrong message.
Coleman cited the Cuban government's crackdown on the opposition in March, when 75 dissidents were rounded up and sentenced to prison terms of between six and 28 years.
"I think about the folks in prison and what message that gives them," the Minnesota Republican said.
American moves to eliminate the 40-year-old trade and travel sanctions have "been building for some time, but it's not there yet," Coleman told a small group of American reporters in Havana. "And the March actions create a problem."
Coleman, however, said releasing some or all of the 75 dissidents "would be a good gesture," and would "increase the prospects" for American support to end the trade embargo and travel restrictions.
Coleman arrived here Friday for a four-day visit to study human rights and trade issues.
Coleman is chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. He is especially interested in future business for Minnesota farmers.
Coleman met with parliament speaker Ricardo Alarcon and other communist officials and could meet President Fidel Castro before leaving Monday.
Coleman in the past has said he believes that eliminating the trade and travel restrictions could help nurture democracy and human rights in the Caribbean nation.
But after meeting Saturday with dissidents and the relatives of jailed opponents, he said the timing is wrong.
Minnesota farmers have sold about $70 million in agricultural products to Cuba since communist officials began taking advantage of a 2000 law that created an exception to the sanctions. [End]
Visiting the Devil***"If President Lula wants to deny with facts, and not with words, that he has turned himself into the greatest international supporter of the Cuban Communist regime - with all the serious responsibilities that it implies before the Cuban people and the generous, cordial and intuitive Brazilian people, but, above all, before God - let him adopt categorical diplomatic measures to contribute to the liberation of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Cuban political prisoners. Let him do something effective to save the lives of the political prisoners Martha Beatriz Roque and Oscar Biscet, who agonize in the Cuban jails, responding thus to the public call that has just been made by the Cuban organization Cuban Unity, of Miami. Let him not cross his arms before the drama of the Cuban physicist Dr. López Linares, currently residing in Brazil, who fruitlessly wrote the Brazilian president requesting his intervention to be able to travel to Cuba to meet his little son Juan Paolo, four years of age. Let him not try to whitewash the Castroite crimes by alleging the external 'blockade' or the alleged 'advances in the social sphere,' as health and education, that in reality are two implacable instruments of ideological, mental, political and police control of the unfortunate Cubans. Let him, in short, contribute, without euphemisms, toward the urgent liberation of Cuba."***