By DPA
Washington : US President George W. Bush urged the world to stop looking away from human rights abuses in Cuba and get tough with Fidel Castro’s regime, but analysts doubt the speech will have much of an impact on how other countries deal with the communist island.
Bush predicted that change was soon coming to Cuba, citing recent, peaceful demonstrations as an example that the Cuban people now realise the regime was in its “dying gasps”, and said countries need to start planning for a transition to democratic rule.
Bush criticised nations who have sought warm relations with Castro and his brother Raul, who has been running the country since Castro fell ill in July 2006.
“As with all totalitarian systems, Cuba’s regime no doubt has other horrors still unknown to the rest of the world,” Bush said. “Once revealed … they will shame the regime’s defenders and all those democracies that have been silent.”
Bush announced an initiative Wednesday to set up an international “freedom fund” to raise billions of dollars to help the Cuban economy once the regime is gone or a market economy, basic freedoms and real elections have been introduced.
But analysts believe the effort to raise the money will fall on deaf ears, in part because many countries are already engaging Cuba without taking the hardline US approach.
Bush’s effort to shame the international community into isolating Cuba will also raise questions about US relations with countries that abuse human rights or are led by despots, they said.
“Bush will never get the rest of the world to join in the embargo or isolation policy,” said Marifeli Perez-Stable, an expert on US-Cuban relations at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.
The White House insisted that Bush’s speech was not timed to take place a week ahead of the UN General Assembly annual vote that in the past has overwhelmingly called on the United States to end its crippling embargo on Cuba in place since the 1960s.
Aside from the food and medicine Washington has sent to the country for years, Bush said he has no intention of lifting the embargo because doing so would benefit the political leadership and not the people.
“America will have no part in giving oxygen to a criminal regime victimising its own people,” Bush said. “We will not support the old way with new faces, the old system held together by new chains.”
The analysts noted that the US has a history of dealing with or supporting human rights abusers.
“This is a strategy that can backfire on the US,” said Perez-Stable.
She pointed to the US backing of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran whose secret police terrorised the population, and support for anti-communist dictatorships in Latin American during the Cold War.
Phil Peters, an analyst at the Lexington Institute outside Washington, said the Bush administration continues to have good relations with questionable governments because of economic and strategic needs.
“Bush is criticising other countries for the same policies we follow toward China and Vietnam,” he said.
US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, however, said that if so many countries were willing to speak out against the violent crackdown on dissidents that took place last month in Myanmar, then they should also be willing to criticise Cuba.
“There is such outrage today about the atrocities going on in Burma (Myanmar),” he said. “Well, where is the outrage about the atrocities going on in Cuba?”