A week earlier, the European Union (EU) announced its member states had unanimously decided to end high-level visits to Cuba, cut back cultural exchanges with the island, and—in a move seen by Cubans as particularly provocative—invite opponents of the Cuban Revolution to receptions at their embassies in Havana.

An EU statement declared that the measures were in response to the recent trials and executions of three hijackers and the prosecution of several dozen opponents of the Cuban Revolution in April.

The sanctions are part of the campaign that imperialist governments from Washington to Paris have been waging to brand Cuba as a repressive dictatorship. This campaign has focused on the trials of 75 opponents of the revolution, portraying them as “dissidents” victimized for expressing their ideas.

The 75 were convicted for acts of collaboration with the U.S. government as part of its 44-year-long campaign to overthrow the Cuban government. Over the past year the head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, James Cason, has openly organized provocations such as funneling millions of dollars to finance the activities of these individuals, who posed as “independent journalists,” “independent librarians,” “independent doctors,” or even “independent trade unionists.”

The propaganda campaign has also sought to lump the trials of the U.S.-financed “dissidents” together with the case of three armed hijackers, presenting them as harmless individuals who sought to leave the island for political reasons. The three were tried and convicted for commandeering a ferry off the coast of Havana and threatening the lives of its passengers, and were executed. The case was part of a string of violent hijackings that escalated over the past year, fostered by Washington’s policy of limiting visas for Cuban applicants, automatically granting legal residence to any Cuban who reaches U.S. territory by whatever means, and refusing to prosecute hijackers. No further hijackings from Cuba have been reported since these trials.

As part of this propaganda drive, on June 5 the 15-member European Union issued a statement that accused the revolutionary government of actions “aiming not only at violating fundamental freedoms in Cuba, but also at depriving civilians of the ultimate human right, that of life.” Cuban government officials said they first learned about the declaration in the international press.

The statement, released by the Greek government, which currently holds the EU presidency, claimed Havana had trampled on the rights of “members of the Cuban opposition and of independent journalists, being deprived of their freedom for having expressed freely their opinion.” It demanded their immediate release.

The statement also warned that the body would “proceed to the reevaluation of the EU common position”—a threat to take further sanctions. In Brussels, according to the Associated Press, an EU spokesman said the European Union member states wanted “closer economic and political relations” with the Caribbean nation but “only if Cuba becomes more democratic.”

Cuba’s largest trade and investment ties are with countries in the European Union, accounting for 34 percent of its foreign commerce.  
 
Some economic ties already cut off
In a June 11 statement, the Cuban foreign ministry pointed out that the Italian government had already unilaterally cut off 40 million euros in “cooperation aid” to Cuba earmarked for agricultural projects, medical equipment, and other social needs projected by the Cuban government.

The foreign ministry cited other hostile actions taken by governments in the European Union over the past three months, including a series of EU statements condemning Cuba for the April trials and the Dutch government’s cancellation of a trade mission to Havana.

On April 30 the European Commission decided to postpone “indefinitely” a request by Cuba to join the Cotonou Agreement, a trade accord between EU governments and some of their former colonies. In response, Cuba withdrew its application.

This imperialist campaign against revolutionary Cuba has been echoed by social-democratic, Stalinist, and other forces in Europe that identify themselves as the left. In France, for example, the Communist Party, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), and other parties in the workers movement publicly condemned the Cuban government’s recent actions as “repressive.” The group Reporters without Borders and other outfits staged physical confrontations at Cuban tourism and diplomatic offices in Paris on April 4 and on April 24.

Cuban leaders responded to the EU powers’ latest sanctions by pointing to their hypocrisy. In a June 12 speech to an international conference in Havana, Cuban president Fidel Castro said that while those governments were quick to condemn Cuba for supposed human rights violations, “none of the EU members said a single word about the crimes committed against thousands of Angolans and Mozambicans in dirty wars organized by capitalism’s centers of power” in recent decades.

In its statement, Cuba’s foreign ministry said the EU maintained a double standard on the question of the death penalty, by condemning Cuba for its legitimate actions but never asking the UN Human Rights Commission to denounce Washington for the 71 executions it carried out last year or for seeking the death penalty against minors and individuals who are mentally ill. It pointed to the brutal conditions facing the 2 million people in U.S. prisons today, as well as Washington’s violations “of the most elementary norms of human rights at the naval base in Guantánamo” and the roundup of thousands of U.S. residents of Arab or Muslim background who are denied the right to due process.

Cuban leaders said the European powers were attacking Cuba in order to ingratiate themselves with Washington and patch up earlier differences over the imperialist war against Iraq, which they described as a result of the Bush administration’s “fascist” foreign policy.  
 
Havana directs fire at Madrid, Rome
Cuban officials directed their fire at the Spanish and Italian governments. They pointed to the cutoff of development assistance by Rome, and noted that the Spanish regime of Prime Minister José María Aznar has been the most insistent in pushing the EU to take hostile measures against Cuba.

Cuban foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque said that Havana does not judge all the European Union governments equally, and “knows well who are the principal instigators of this unusual provocation.”

In his June 11 speech Castro condemned Aznar, calling him “a little Fuehrer with a mustache and Nazi-fascist ideology” who is allied with Washington. He also called Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi a “fascist” and a “clown.” At June 12 demonstrations outside the Spanish and Italian embassies in Havana, marchers carried signs calling Berlusconi a puppet and comparing him to fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

After the EU decreed the cutoff in cultural exchanges with the island, the Cuban government announced it would take over the Spanish embassy’s cultural center in Havana, suggesting that Madrid was using it to fund counterrevolutionary groups in Cuba. The foreign ministry said the center—renamed the Federico García Lorca Cultural Center after the Spanish poet who was assassinated in 1936 by the fascist forces in Spain during the civil war there—was being placed under Cuban administration and would be “dedicated to promote the best values of Spanish culture in our country.”

Meanwhile, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell took Washington’s anti-Cuba campaign to a meeting in Santiago, Chile, of the Organization of American States (OAS) to demand that Latin American governments help “hasten the inevitable democratic transition to Cuba,” a euphemism for overthrowing the Cuban revolutionary government. He denounced Cuba as “our hemisphere’s only dictatorship.”

A number of Latin American government officials, however, told the media they resented Powell’s heavy-handed insistence that they focus on Cuba at the expense of other issues. In a registration of their displeasure, OAS member states declined to elect the U.S. government’s nominee to the OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the first time a U.S. representative has not been voted onto the commission. Washington’s nominee was Rafael Martínez, an Orlando, Florida, medical malpractice lawyer and brother of U.S. secretary of housing Melquiades Martínez.