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. ***
"In a solemn public ceremony, he improvises with a tirade that discredits one of the [three] branches of government, and precisely the branch not involved with party politics, which has the constitutional role of addressing disputes between individuals and institutions. With accusations of biased verdicts, the existence of 'black boxes' and venality in sectors of the Judiciary, the president endangers the wise and time-honored principle of independence of the three branches, a basic principle of democracy. A democracy without respect for the limits of each branch is not a democracy but an authoritarian regime typical of dictatorships" ("Crise de Poderes," Correio do Povo, 4/26/2003).***