US fails to broker deal on Cuba and OAS

The United States failed in a marathon bid overnight Tuesday to broker a deal for Cuba to return to the Organization of American States.

The development all but dashed any near-term hopes for the United States to work out a path with the OAS to lift Cuba's 47-year suspension from the body while trying to pressure on Havana to move towards democracy.

The OAS policy-making general assembly was due to meet for the last day on Wednesday in the northern Honduran commercial hub of San Pedro Sula, but US officials conceded that chances of a deal were faint.

"We were unable to construct a consensus largely because the ALBA countries were unprepared at this point to accept an enumeration of the core (democratic) principles" in the OAS charter, senior US diplomat Tom Shannon told reporters.

He was referring to the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) alliance set up by Cuba and Venezuela as a fair trade alternative to US-backed free trade policies. Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua and the Caribbean island of Dominica are also members.

Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa also said that ALBA countries were the ones that failed to join the consensus.

The late-night US bid came hours after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she had failed to find common ground with her Latin American counterparts before taking a flight to Egypt and join President Barack Obama.

Clinton also suggested that the United States was largely isolated in its push to attach strict conditions on granting Cuba a full return to the Washington-based organization's work.

If the OAS fails to press this case, she warned, it could have negative consequences for a body whose charter is based on representative democratic principles.

"The Obama administration is obviously pretty much by itself in making clear that this (issue) has to be carefully thought through," she said.

However, Shannon and Clinton said they had also made progress in persuading Latin American states of the need to make Cuba respect the democratic principles now almost universally accepted from Canada down to Chile.

In its bid to improve its one-on-one ties with Cuba, the United States also demands the release of political prisoners and improvements in human rights.

However, leftist Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua and other Latin American countries, like Honduras, led calls to end immediately Cuba's decades-old suspension which they call a "historic mistake."

Even though Cuba itself rejects the OAS, analysts said, many countries want to use the debate to push for a lifting of the decades-old US embargo on Havana, while others want to embarrass the United States.

A compromise proposal had late Monday generated support from 26 of the 34 member states, such as more moderate leftist countries like Brazil and Chile, those close to the negotiations said.

It was not clear whether Washington had made concessions to back the proposal, which the sources said calls for beginning a process that could bring Cuba back to the fold but in line with the OAS democratic charter. The charter requires members be representative democracies, while respecting different domestic political organization.

Cuba is the Americas' only one-party communist regime, and a harsh OAS critic. Though political parties other than the Cuban Communist Party are outlawed in Cuba, Havana maintains Cuba is a democracy, and far less corrupt than other multi-party governments.

Havana this week called the OAS a "pestilent corpse" in state media.

The chief US diplomat has sought to answer critics who say Washington is not moving fast enough on Cuba by insisting Obama has made more changes in four months than his predecessor George W. Bush had made in eight years.

Since taking office in January, Obama and Clinton have called past US policy a failure and taken concrete steps to ease ties with Cuban President Raul Castro, who officially took over the reins from older brother Fidel last year.

Fidel Castro, 82, wrote in an editorial in the Communist Party newspaper Granma Wednesday that in Honduras "the battle no doubt has been fierce" given that many small countries are highly dependent on the United States.

"Cuba is no enemy of peace, nor opposed to exchanges or cooperation between countries with different political systems. But it has been and will be intransigent in defending its principles," Castro wrote, underscoring that Havana is not interested in political opening.