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Bleak Future Seen for EU Relations with Cuba*** Unlike the United States, European governments have maintained trade and diplomatic relations with Cuba since Castro's 1959 revolution. Economic ties have multiplied since the demise of East European communism deprived Cuba of COMECON markets for its sugar in the early 1990s.

Now European diplomats find themselves in the position of being the bad guys in Castro's books, while Cuban purchases of food and agricultural products from the United States have taken off since the easing of the American embargo two years ago.

Cuba has bought $480 million in U.S. farm products, but it has to pay cash due to a credit ban in the U.S. embargo. European businessmen that are owed millions of dollars for shipments to Cuba are frustrated to see U.S. firms get payed up front.

"The Americans are benefiting because the Cubans are using credit lines from French banks to pay for food imports and putting on hold debt payments to European exporters," said a European diplomat.

Facing European criticism for locking up dissidents, Cuba in May withdrew a request to joining an EU aid and preferential trade pact for former colonies, the Cotonou Agreement, which could have provided the island with up to $100 million (euros) a year in aid.

Diplomats believe Castro concluded he had lost Europe as an ally with the grim prospect of 10 former Soviet bloc nations joining the EU next year with an anti-communist agenda.

Former Czech president Vaclav Havel has nominated leading Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

In a July 26 speech, marking the fist salvos of his guerrilla uprising 50 years ago, Castro charged they would serve as "Trojan horses" for the United States inside the European Union.

"They are full of hatred for Cuba," Castro said. ***

In Cuba's Tropical Gulag*** Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has taken a number of initiatives in recent months to make the world aware of this tropical gulag, and the reaction of the Cuban authorities has been increasingly virulent. During a peaceful protest outside the Cuban Embassy in Paris in May, Reporters Without Borders activists were attacked by a gang of thugs armed with iron bars. They were accompanied by the Cuban ambassador in person, who was screaming and shouting insults and urging his men to attack the demonstrators.

A few weeks later, the Cuban authorities welcomed legal proceedings instigated in France against our NGO. We had used the famous photo of Che Guevara with beret and ruffled hair in a poster denouncing Cuba as "the world's biggest prison for journalists." It was not to the liking of the daughter of Alberto Diaz Gutierrez ("Korda"), the photographer who took the picture. The poster was banned and RSF was ordered to pay damages.

The latest chapter in this saga is that RSF has just been suspended from the U.N. for a year at Cuba's initiative. The governments that voted for this ban -- a fine band of human-rights predators themselves -- even refused to let our activists defend themselves. And what was our crime? To have ridiculed the human rights commission's current chairwoman, Najat Al-Hajjaji, the representative of Libya, a country not known for scrupulously respecting human rights.

But our plight is very small indeed compared to what Cubans face every day. The latest crackdown on political dissidents and independent journalists and the execution on April 11 of three young men who had tried to hijack a ferry in order to reach the coast of Florida set off a wave of condemnation and even got the European Union to rethink its cooperation with Cuba. It was high time. It remains for those who regularly visit the Cuban beach resort of Varadero to ask what is going on out of view in the backyard of Latin America's last dictatorship.***