Drive to lift 47-year bar on Cuba's membership of the OAS

Published on Friday 17 April 2009 22:07

THE head of the Organisation of American States has said that he will ask members to readmit Cuba 47 years after they voted out the communist nation.

OAS secretary-general Jose Miguel Insulza made the announcement yesterday as regional leaders began arriving for the 34-nation summit that excludes Cuba and amid indications of a major thaw in US-Cuban relations.

Mr Insulza said he would request at a meeting beginning of the organisation's general assembly in Honduras at the end of May that it annul the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba.

The resolution called Cuba's communist system incompatible with the organisation's principles and coincided with the imposition of a US trade embargo. Among OAS members, only Mexico did not break relations at the time.

Most countries in the hemisphere have since restored diplomatic ties and have been clamouring in recent months for an end to Cuba's exclusion.

On Thursday, Cuban leader Raul Castro said he was prepared to discuss any and all topics – from freedom of the press to freeing political prisoners – with Washington. Cuba is the hemisphere's only non-democracy.

At a meeting in Venezuela on Thursday of allied nations organised by President Hugo Chavez, the Cuban chief called for the OAS to "disappear".