The U.S. should resist moves to readmit Cuba to the Organization of American States, a leading Senator argues. Such a move would make a nonsense of the OAS members’ conviction, outlined in the Inter-American Democratic Charter, that “the peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy, and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it.”
There should be no ”Cuba exception” to the hemisphere’s commitment to democracy, writes Senator Mel Martinez. Washington should “encourage the OAS to formulate how it might help Cuba make a transition to democracy and become fully compliant with the Democratic Charter,” he contends. “The Cuban people, not the current government elite in Havana, need to be the guides of this process.”
He cites the recent open letter to the OAS, signed by some 250 Cuban democracy, human rights and civil society activists, which insists that:
Cuba has not been separated from the OAS. It is the tyrannical regime which violates the public liberties of Cubans that has been separated. Nevertheless, what worries us most is not the affront which would be committed against our rights by accepting the dictatorship which oppresses us as an equal in terms of the fundamental values of its democratic neighbors, but rather the damage that would be inflicted on the hemisphere itself.
There is significant bipartisan opposition to Cuba’s re-admission to the OAS. Such a concession would put at risk the regional consensus that has consolidated the hemisphere’s relatively recent democratization, according to the Brookings Institution’s Ted Piccone, co-editor of the newly released book, The Obama Administration and the Americas: Agenda for Change:
The governments of the region, as they emerged from years of military dictatorship in the 1980s, agreed to lock arms and resist any attempt to overthrow civilian constitutional rule. This joint approach has served the region well when such countries as Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala and Haiti faced political turmoil. The commitment to core democratic standards, expressed through the Inter-American Democratic Charter, is central to the region’s identity and compares well to the European model of integration based on common democratic values and forms of government.
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