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Welcome visit to Cuba

Swire's trip a welcome, if small, move away from US-British foreign policy

This week's visit to Cuba by Foreign Office Minister Hugo Swire marks a small but refreshing move away from at least one aspect of US-British foreign policy.

Although Britain has for some time opposed the US economic blockade of Cuba, no government minister has visited the island for almost 10 years.

In March 2005, Labour government minister Bill Rammell supposedly ended an EU-led diplomatic freeze prompted by Cuba's crackdown on US-sponsored subversion.

He took the opportunity to harangue the Havana regime about its human rights record, in particular about its treatment of political dissidents. But there have been no ministerial visits since, doubtless at the behest of the US White House.

It takes some brass neck for British governments guilty of illegal invasions of sovereign countries and the consequent slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians to lecture a nation under siege from the world's most powerful imperialist state about democracy and freedom.

But at least our diplomats were on the side of rights and justice in the United Nations last Tuesday, when 193 member states voted to condemn the US trading and financial embargo against Cuba for the 23rd consecutive year. Only the world's top two outlaw states, the US and Israel, support the continuation of economic warfare against the Cuban people.

 

Poor little Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands - poisoned by more than a decade of US nuclear weapons tests - abstained in a pathetic attempt to defy their official status as US dependencies.

While in Cuba, Mr Swire signed a series of accords to promote economic, political, social and sporting relations between Britain and Cuba.

He also praised the latter's magnificent contribution in west Africa to the struggle against the Ebola epidemic and the Havana government's role in hosting long-running peace talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and the Bogota regime of President Juan Manuel Santos.

Cuba has sent 250 medical professionals to treat Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea and makes the biggest contribution in human resources of any country or international agency to the fight against the deadly virus, according to the World Health Organisation.

Some of these workers will soon staff an anti-
Ebola training academy and treatment centres being constructed in Sierra Leone following the recent arrival in Freetown of British military personnel and vehicles.

 

At the same time, Cuba has been hosting a conference in Havana to discuss ways of preventing the spread of the disease in the Americas.

Officials from the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention have been among those attending from 32 countries on the initiative of the Alba Bolivarian alliance founded by the late president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

In such ways, socialist Cuba and its communist government yet again demonstrate their humanitarian values.

Where all too often Britain and the US export arms, armies, death and destruction, Cuba exports physicians in their hundreds and thousands to help the victims of imperialism's aggression or neglect.

Mr Swire's successful visit should spark a sincere effort by British governments to develop full and fruitful relations with the Cuban people and their representatives.

The Scottish and Welsh administrations have an important role to play too, enhancing their own links with Havana and the citizens of a generous, courageous country.

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