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CUBA TO PERMIT HUMAN RIGHTS MONITORING; U.S.-LED CRITICS DOWNPLAY CUBAN GAINS.

Article Excerpt
Cuba's Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque announced on Dec. 10 that his country would sign the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This represents a reversal of a policy of refusal to sign taken when the UN adopted the pacts at the height of the Cold War in 1976. Signing will happen in March and will be followed in early 2009 by acceptance of UN human rights monitoring. The two documents taken together make up the UN Bill of Human Rights. They are legally binding protocols, committing Cuba to a number of things, among them freedom of expression and association and the right to travel abroad.

Cuba resisted the monitoring during the period before the UN Human Rights Council came into being, when the old UN Human Rights Commission was the scene of annual attempts at censure, never quite successful, orchestrated by the US.

"This decision reflects our desire for full cooperation with the United Nations on the basis of respect for our national sovereignty and the right of the Cuban people to their self-determination," said Perez Roque.

None of this is meant to suggest, however, that the human rights-based gamesmanship with the US is anywhere near over. Minutes after Perez Roque spoke to reporters, dissenters, whom Cuba calls mercenaries of the US, staged a rally to mark International Human Rights Day. According to reports, two demonstrators were detained as Cuban government supporters shouted them down, and ten women from Spain demanding the release of people they called political prisoners told the US press that they were being confined to their hotels and that police had taken their passports pending their deportation to Spain.

The women were members of the Convergencia Democratica Catalunya, who had come to join a group known as the Damas...