Can Colombia’s Santos Solve the Cuba Conundrum?
It isn’t easy playing mediator in the chest-thumping, Cold War time warp of U.S.-Cuba relations. It’s even harder to resolve Washington-Havana disputes in a way that pleases both sides. But Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos may well have performed that diplomatic feat this week when he defused a potential crisis at next month’s Summit of the Americas in Cartagena. Santos got Cuba to drop its request for an invitation to the gathering, thus assuring U.S. President Barack Obama will attend; but Santos, during a personal visit to Cuban President Raúl Castro on Wednesday, also promised to make Cuba’s exclusion a “high-level” summit topic, thus averting a possible summit boycott by leftist Latin American presidents.
The outcome further burnishes Santos’ growing reputation as a hemispheric interlocutor. “He’s definitely showing a certain capacity for regional leadership,” say Peter Hakim, emeritus president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “He’s set a good foundation for dealing with this issue.” Santos told Castro that as the Apr. 14-15 summit’s host, he can’t invite Cuba because “there isn’t [hemispheric] consensus” on letting the communist island take part in a gathering that, since its inception in 1994 (this is the sixth), is open only to democratically elected governments. That was a firm nod to the U.S., which considers Colombia its strongest ally in South America, if not all Latin America. But before leaving Havana Wednesday night, Santos stressed that “Colombia wants the Cuban situation discussed in a constructive and high-level manner” at Cartagena, with an eye toward including Cuba in the next summit.
Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/03/09/colombias-santos-plays-regional-statesman-can-he-solve-the-cuba-conundrum/?xid=rss-topstories#ixzz1ogYBH8d5
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