Spain to maintain dialogue with Cuba on human rights

Baku (Azerbaijan), March 3 (IANS/EFE) Spain’s foreign minister said here that Madrid will maintain its “dialogue strategy” with Cuba as a way of achieving freedom for its political prisoners and respect for human rights in the Caribbean country.

Miguel Angel Moratinos said that the most effective and constructive way to “make progress and get results” is through dialogue, and added that the proof is that many of those prisoners of conscience who were in jail are now free “thanks to that Spanish policy”.

The Spanish minister made the statement in Baku at a joint press conference with Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov amid his tour to a number of Caucasus countries within the framework of Madrid’s term in the European Union presidency.

Moratinos said that the idea is to “intensify” Spain’s commitment so that the goal of “accompanying the reform process that is going on in Cuba gets results in terms of human rights and secures the release of political prisoners”.

“It’s what we’re going to continue doing,” he said when asked by a reporter about demands from Spain’s main opposition Popular Party for a new Cuba policy in response to last week’s death of political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo after an 85-day hunger strike.

“Our strategy is the same, our mechanism is the same, employing dialogue as the constructive way to make progress and get results,” Moratinos said.

“The proof is that many of those political prisoners who were in jail previously (in Cuba) are now free, many of them in Spain, thanks to Spanish policy,” the minister said, alluding to the four dissidents whom the Havana regime deported to Madrid in February 2008.

In his opinion, there was no reason to modify Spain’s approach to the Raul Castro government, “because in the end what we want is to improve relations between Cuba and Spain, and improve by means of that relationship the situation of all Cubans”.

–IANS/EFE