Logo for the 39th OAS General Assembly (web page)

WASHINGTON (AP) ­ Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says Cuba won't be allowed to rejoin the Organization of American States until it makes political reforms, releases political prisoners and respects human rights.

Clinton said Wednesday that the grouping of Western Hemisphere nations requires its members to adhere to democratic standards that the communist government of Cuba does not yet meet. She made the comments to lawmakers ahead of the organization's annual meeting.

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I’ve been very vocal in saying that we must repeal Resolution VI of 1962. It’s an old resolution, it’s not valid anymore, and it doesn’t condemn Cuba for not being democratic. It condemns it for being a member of the Sino-Soviet axis and says that this axis is aggressive against the United States. But it doesn’t exist anymore. The Sino-Soviet axis disappeared about four or five years after Cuba’s suspension. The Soviet Union disappeared almost 20 years ago and the Chinese are even friends with the United States today, so it’s really crazy. It is a piece of the Cold War that was left in a corner and we must get rid of it.
--José Miguel Insulza, Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS)

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During the General Assembly, some may advocate to allow Cuba to participate in the OAS, without having made any progress on the fundamental tenants of democracy and human rights...as the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees foreign assistance, I would expect the U.S. Congress to ask, "Should we continue to pay 60 percent of the budget of an institution that just discarded democratic principles as a fundamental part of its Charter?
--Sen. Robert Menendez

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Governments can change but the instruments they used to turn us into a colony are still the same...The OAS was the instrument for those crimes...Cuba respects the opinions of the governments of sister nations in Latin America and the Caribbean who think in a different manner, but it doesn’t wish to be part of that institution.
--Fidel Castro, Reflections, May 10

An oft-repeated refrain at the Summit of the Americas was that Cuba should no longer be excluded from the Organization of American States. The issue will come to a head when the General Assembly of the OAS meets June 2-3 in Honduras. If Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and others insist on a vote, US isolation in the Hemisphere could be embarrassingly illustrated.

Secretary Clinton is ill advised legally and politically. This is another instance of the US listening without hearing, when conventional inside-the-beltway wisdom imposes the dead hand of the past over real US interests. As the Secretary acknowledged at a town hall meeting for Foreign Affairs Day at the State Department May 1st:

we’re facing an almost united front against the United States regarding Cuba. Every country, even those with whom we are closest, is just saying you’ve got to change, you can’t keep doing what you’re doing.

Had Cuba been suspended from the OAS because of its lack of multi-party democracy, other members then and subsequently would have faced the same fate. The goal of the Inter-American Democratic Charter was to discourage military coups by excluding a regime that overthrew an elected government, i.e. moved the democratic process backward in its country.

Article 19...an unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order or an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the democratic order in a member state, constitutes, while it persists, an insurmountable obstacle to its government’s participation in sessions of the General Assembly, the Meeting of Consultation, the Councils of the Organization, the specialized conferences, the commissions, working groups, and other bodies of the Organization. (full text)

While the Charter is unambiguous that "member states are responsible for organizing, conducting, and ensuring free and fair electoral processes", an accompanying OAS explanatory document demonstrates that the means of dealing with elections that are "divisive" or "controversial" are missions and dialogue not suspension. Cuba's unorthodox form of democracy can be challenged the next time it holds elections, but is not grounds for exclusion.

Is there any contemporaneous documentation that sustains a view that adoption of the Charter in 2001 was seen as an obstacle to Cuba's return unless it changed the form of its existing sovereign government?

Moreover, the Charter is not written to be retroactive. It is not reasonable to apply criteria for membership ex post facto to a country suspended only because of intense political and economic pressure by a disproportionately powerful member for no longer applicable reasons.

A specialist involved in OAS preparatory discussions wrote me that, "It is immensely complicated, and it is not clear how it will come out." Thus it is especially unfortunate if the US takes a hard line ideological stance responsive to special interests and tries once more to impose its will on the Hemisphere, reminiscent of 1962.

My analogy from Indochina is that the US originally opposed Vietnam joining ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), but the independent action by the region to incorporate it and Laos and Cambodia helped Clinton to normalize. Ironically, the US in the Bush era urged still communist Vietnam to take a leading role in ASEAN according to a high level friend from the Foreign Ministry.

When Hillary Clinton, Bob Menendez and Fidel Castro agree that Cuba should not reenter the OAS, it suggests this is just the kind of decisive timely move by the region that is needed to break the logjam of inertia and distrust. By proving itself independent of US domestic agendas, the OAS will strengthen itself--and not only in Cuban eyes.

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Two opinions more expert than my own from Professors William LeoGrande and Philip Brenner of American University, in response to questions I posed, can be read here