• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Cuba, Mexico upset by US move to halt energy meeting

Posted on: Monday, 6 February 2006, 14:32 CST

By Marc Frank

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba and Mexico on Monday condemned the U.S.-ordered eviction of 16 Cuban officials from an American-owned hotel in Mexico City during a conference with U.S. energy companies.

The Cuban officials, including a vice minister, were told to leave the Sheraton hotel on Friday during a conference organized by the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association, which opposes the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

The Cuban government said the action showed that the 45-year-old embargo was an international blockade that infringed the rights of third countries, contrary to the U.S. position, which says the embargo is a bilateral affair.

"The tentacles of the U.S. government's blockade and criminal economic war against Cuba reach any corner of the planet, including to the detriment of other nation's sovereignty and laws," the official Cuban daily Granma said.

Cuban officials and Kirby Jones, president of the organizing association, said that after the first day of the conference the Cubans were told by the hotel that they had to leave and their deposits were forfeited.

Jones said the meetings, attended by representatives of the largest U.S. oil refiner, Valero Energy Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and others including Texas port authorities, moved to a Mexican hotel and ended on Saturday.

Nadeen Ayala, spokeswoman for Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc, which owns Sheraton hotels, said the company had been asked by the U.S. Treasury Department to tell the Cuban officials to leave the hotel.

Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces the embargo against Cuba, insists it is illegal to provide services to Cuban nationals and entities in third countries.

"It was an order that we had to comply with" because Starwood is a U.S. company," she said at the company headquarters in White Plains, New York. "We were working in accordance with the requirements set forth by the Treasury office to remove the Cubans."

Mexico City's left-wing government said it had begun an investigation into the incident and Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez warned that the hotel could be fined for discriminating against the Cubans.

"Both federal and local laws need to be applied if people were indeed ejected for being Cubans. In this case it would be a fine for the hotel," he told Mexican radio.

OTHER MEETINGS UNCHALLENGED

Jones said he had arranged nine other meetings, in different topics, in Mexico, including several at a Westin Hotel in Cancun which was also owned by Starwood, and that they had gone ahead without U.S. interference.

"It is absolutely extraordinary that...the U.S. government on a Friday night should engage in efforts to kick 16 Cubans out of a hotel in Mexico, sitting and meeting with U.S. businessmen," he said in an interview after returning to Washington.

U.S. sanctions encompass U.S. subsidiaries in other countries and prohibit the use of U.S. materials in the manufacture of products sold to Cuba and Cuban materials in products sold to the United States.

Despite U.S. sanctions the two countries did some $400 million in business last year under a 2000 amendment that allows U.S. agricultural sales to the Communist-run Caribbean island for cash.

The Bush administration and influential Cuban-American lobbyists supports strengthening the sanctions.

Jones says that, with the United States increasingly seeking energy sources close to home, it is ridiculous that U.S. oil companies be forbidden from competing with the Chinese, Europeans, Canadians and others in the sea off Cuba.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there could be 5 billion barrels of oil in the area plus large quantities of natural gas.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Bell in Mexico City and Paritosh Bansal in New York)

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category