U.S. changes stance on Cuba's inclusion in OAS

As more countries clamor to lift the communist country's 1962 suspension from the hemispheric group, the U.S. State Department threw a curve ball at the debate late Tuesday by submitting a new proposal that would eventually allow Cuba back to the OAS -- as long as Havana abides by the organization's democratic principles.

Three proposals were submitted that ultimately reach the same goal: an end to Cuba's suspension.

Just how the suspension should be lifted will be taken up Wednesday at the group's permanent council meeting in Washington, where they will hammer out a final agenda for thegeneral assembly next week in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The council will decide which of the three proposals submitted that lift Cuba's suspension will be voted on in Honduras.

Nicaragua submitted a resolution calling for Cuba's suspension to be lifted because it is an ''unjust affront to the OAS'' that ''violates international law.'' Honduras also submitted a resolution in more straight-forward language asking for sanctions against Cuba to be lifted, according to a draft agenda of the meeting.

At the last minute, Costa Rica's proposal to study the issue before one of the OAS' legal commissions was replaced by one from the U.S. State Department.

The proposal from the United States calls for ''initiating a dialogue'' with Cuba about its eventual reintegration to the hemispheric body -- ``consistent with principles and values of the OAS charter, the InterAmerican Democratic charter and other instruments.''

The OAS Permanent Council would start those talks, and report back in a year.

In the bid submitted Tuesday evening by Washington's deputy representative to the OAS, W. Lewis Amselem, Washington acknowledged that ``some of the circumstances since Cuba's suspension from full participation in the OAS may have changed.''

Cuba was suspended from the OAS in 1962, officially because of its alliance with the Soviet Union. But as more leftists were elected to lead Latin American nations in the past years, pressure increased to lift the suspension.

The OAS makes its decisions by consensus, and after last month's Summit of the Americas conference in Trinidad, it became increasingly clear that Washington did not have the support to continue to pressure for Cuba's exclusion.

At the same time, Cuban-American members of Congress were outraged that Cuba could be let back in to a group that in 2001 passed the InterAmerican Democratic Charter -- a rule calling for all its members to be democratic.

Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey moved to cut the organization's funding.

For all the flap, Cuba says it isn't interested.

''One way or another, the OAS is totally anachronistic; it serves other interests, and we feel that our path, Cuba's path, is one of Latin American and Caribbean integration, without a presence from outside the continent,'' Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez was quoted as saying in Tuesday's Cuban newspapers.

Cuba, he said, is ``working for our peoples and not for the empire.''