Powell calls for democracy in Cuba - Nations reluctant to discuss Castro's record *** SANTIAGO, Chile -- Secretary of State Colin Powell called on Western Hemisphere nations Monday to help "hasten the inevitable democratic transition in Cuba" and protest a recent wave of arrests and executions by President Fidel Castro's government. Powell, raising the Cuba issue in a forum long reluctant to debate it, told the 34-nation Organization of American States: "The people of Cuba increasingly look to the OAS for help in defending their fundamental freedoms against the depredations of our hemisphere's only dictatorship."
Powell reminded the gathering of its past commitments to democracy, including the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter. That document "declares that `the people of the Americas have a right to democracy.' It does not say that the peoples of the Americas, except Cubans, have a right to democracy," he said.
Many nations of the OAS, which suspended Cuba's membership in 1962, are opposed to discussing Castro's human rights record without also debating the four-decades-old U.S. embargo of the island. ***