ABSTRACT
As we saw in the previous chapter, Clinton’s decision to endorse HelmsBurton did not represent a genuine conversion. On January 3, 1997, before the new Congress came into session, Clinton again suspended the controversial Title III right to bring suit against foreign investors, asserting that there had been ‘real progress’ in getting allies to focus upon democracy. He added that ‘I would expect to continue suspending the right to file suit so long as America’s friends and allies continue their stepped up efforts to promote a transition to democracy in Cuba’. However, apart from the European Union’s Common Position of December 1996 conditioning future relations with Cuba on domestic reforms, the practical significance of which was unclear, this ‘progress’ did not amount to much. The European Platform for Human Rights and Democracy in Cuba was an inflated title for a small group of European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) persuaded by Clinton’s envoy Stuart Eizenstat to focus their attention on Cuba.1 Other NGOs approached Cuba differently, and were wary of being associated with US policy. There was little evidence that European businessmen had noticed the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ condemnation of the denial of workers’ rights in Cuba, or to substantiate Clinton’s claim that ‘European business leaders and organizations are supporting a set of best business principles so, if they invest in Cuba, it will benefit Cuban workers and not the government’. Clinton’s mention of the November 1996 IberoAmerican Summit, where ‘heads of state from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, called for democracy and full respect for human rights, thus emphasizing Cuba’s isolation as the hemisphere’s only nondemocratic nation’, suggested that Cuba had been excluded, after the pattern of the 1994 Miami Summit of the Americas.2 Yet in fact Cuba had been involved with IberoAmerican summitry from the beginning.
