Uruguay Breaks Ties With Cuba - Ambassador given 72 hours to leave

Castro defends taping phone conversation with Mexican president***As for the phone call with Mexican President Vicente Fox that Castro aired on Monday, "A conversation between two heads of state is not a secret confession," he said of the private call about his participation at a U.N. summit last month. Leaders who do not leave behind such records of their time in power "are irresponsible," Castro said. "These are political conversations that interest the whole world." After Castro aired his conversation with Fox to a roomful of international journalists and Cuban officials, the Mexican government complained that it was "unacceptable" for Cuban authorities to violate the privacy of the exchange.

Castro said he reluctantly made the conversation public to prove his assertion that Mexican authorities discouraged him from attending a U.N. poverty summit in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, then had him leave early, so his visit there would not coincide with that of U.S. President George W. Bush. "The government of Mexico does not record nor does it divulge the content of conversations, much less those previously agreed upon as private," the Mexican government said in a statement.***

Fox put in a corner after his plea to Castro [Full Text] MEXICO CITY - Opposition lawmakers Tuesday demanded that President Vicente Fox explain himself to the nation a day after Cuban leader Fidel Castro released a secretly recorded telephone conversation in which the Mexican president asked him to make a hasty exit from the country. Castro embarrassed Fox Monday night by summoning foreign journalists to a news conference in Havana, where he released a taped conversation between the two leaders on March 19. In it, Fox tried to get Castro, who gave 24 hours' notice that he would join other world leaders at last month's United Nations development summit in Monterrey, to keep his visit short. Fox also asked Castro not to criticize the United States or President Bush.

Monday night, Castro accused Fox of caving in to U.S. pressure. The harsh words follow last Friday's vote at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, where Mexico was one of eight Latin American countries that supported a resolution calling for greater political and human rights in Cuba.

In news conferences and interviews last month, both Fox and Mexican Foreign Secretary Jorge Castañeda denied pressuring Castro. Pro-Cuba opposition legislators in Mexico tried for weeks to make Castañeda testify before congress about Castro's hasty, huffy exit from the conference. Now they want Fox to explain before congress or on national television. ''This demonstrates that President Fox lied to the Mexican people. How can we support a president who lies?'' said Congressman Sergio Acosta Salazar of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, the second-ranking member of the Foreign Relations Commission in the lower house of Mexico's National Congress.

For more than seven decades before Fox, Mexico was run by the left-leaning Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in its Spanish initials), which grew out of the Mexican revolution of 1910-17. Acosta's leftist party splintered off from the PRI, and both parties are assailing the conservative Fox. Sen. Silvia Hernandez, a PRI leader and the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Commission, also called on Fox to explain himself. PRI governments stayed out of Cuba's domestic affairs, and in return Castro did not fund or support leftist revolutionaries in Mexico -- the country from which he launched his own rise to power -- as he did elsewhere in Latin America.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Fox administration began firing back. Foreign Secretary Castañeda denied that he or Fox had lied and said Castro was not pressured. What was asked of Castro, he said, was also asked of the United States: that both countries put aside their rivalries to avoid hijacking the development summit.

In a radio interview, Castañeda suggested that Castro feels threatened at home by his growing isolation in Latin America and by growing global support for universal principles of human rights. ''In effect the isolation of the government of Fidel Castro grows greater every day,'' Castañeda said. ``This resolution in Geneva came not from the Czechs but from Latin Americans.'' Throughout much of Castro's four-decade rule, the United States has sponsored U.N. resolutions condemning the lack of democratic rights in Cuba. In recent years, former communist countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland have sponsored the resolutions, but this year Uruguay took the lead and was backed by six other Latin American nations on the Human Rights Commission; Venezuela voted against and Brazil and Ecuador abstained. Even Chile, led by Socialist Ricardo Lagos, joined the call for democracy in Cuba.

''Castro has pretty much burned all his bridges,'' said Ana Maria Salazar, a former Clinton White House official now teaching at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) in Mexico City. News assistant Fernando Moreno in Mexico City contributed to this report. [End]

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